
Class PfHm 

Book . 5^5 



Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



, 



BEFORE AN AUDIENCE' 



cm, 



THE USE OF THE WILL IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 



TALKS TO THE STUDENTS OF 

THE UWVERSITV OF ST. ANDREWS AND 

THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 



BY 



NATHAN SHEPPARD ; 

„«,.« KDTTOB OF "DABWINISK STATED 
«THOB O* "SHUT UP IN PABK. ™££ „ „ CHiKSCTE B BEAD.I 




LOND< 

NEW YORK: 1886 . 44rLBETS 

10 ANT5 12 DEY STREET. 

Ail Bights Reserved. 









Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1886, 

By FUNK & WAGNALLS, 
he Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 




JSrtrfcatrtr 

TO THE MEMORY OF 

JOHN TULLOCH, D.D., 

PRINCIPAL OF ST. MARY'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF ST. 

ANDREWS, BUT FOR WHOSE WORDS OF COMMENDA- 

TION AND ENCOURAGEMENT THESE TALKS 

WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN 

PUBLISHED. 






V 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introductory vii 

I. A Good Speaking Voice to be Acquired by an 

Exercise of the Will 11 * 

II. Articulation to be Acquired by an Exercise of 

the Will 19 * 

III. Physical Earnestness 29 * 

IV. The Self-Reliance for Public Speaking 41 « 

V. The Art of Being Natural 60 * 

VI. The Dramatic Element in Public Speaking 77* 

VII. The Rhetoric for Public Speaking 93 

VIII. A Talk About Audiences 116 

IX. How to Think of Something to Say 133 

X. The Right Shape for an Audience-Room 146 



INTBODUOTOKY. 



When I was lecturing in Great Britain I gave these 
talks on Public Speaking to the students of the Univer- 
sity of St. Andrews and the students of the University 
of Aberdeen. I was so much encouraged by the com- 
mendation they received from, not only the students, 
but the principals and professors who did me the honor 
to attend, that I continued to give them at other univer- 
sities and colleges, notably at Allegheny College, Mead- 
ville, Pa., where I spent some of the happiest hours of 
my life as a lecturer and teacher. 

They were fragmentary then, they are fragmentary 
now. So is all truth, so are all facts. 

What I say in these talks I say from experience, from 
a long, hard-earned, and painful experience. I know 
something of the ecstasy that accompanies success, and I 
have had my share of the torture that comes with failure 
in this perplexing and elusive art. 

When I made up my mind to devote my mind and 
body to public speaking, I was told by my tutors and 
governors that I would certainly fail ; that my articu- 
lation was a failure, and it was ; that my voice was 
feeble, and it was ; that my organs of speech were inad- 
equate, and they were ; and that if I would screw up 
my little mouth it could be put into my mother's thim- 
ble, and it could. Stinging words these certainly were, 
and cruel ones, I shall never forget them ; possibly, 



Vlll INTRODUCTORY. 

however, they stung me into a persistency which I would 
never have known but for these words. At all events, 
that is the philosophy of the " self-made" world of man- 
kind. I may not have accomplished much, I do not 
claim to have accomplished much. It is something to 
have made a living out of my art for twenty years, and 
that I do claim to have done in spite of every obstacle 
and every discouragement by the method herein recom- 
mended to others, by turning my will upon my voice 
and vocal organs, by cultivating my elocutionary instinct 
and my ear for the cadences of rhetoric, by knowing 
what I and my voice and my feelings were about, by 
making the most of myself. 

I increased my voice tenfold, doubled my chest, and 
brought my unoratorical organs somewhat into subjection 
to my will. If I had taken the common advice and 
" forgotten myself," I would have lost myself and my 
bread and butter. If I had been " wholly absorbed in 
my subject," my subject would have been wholly 
absorbed in my epiglottis. If I had contented myself 
with acquiring the " emphasis" or " rendering" of 
Hamlet's soliloquy, or Tell's address to the mountains, 
as furnished by the professional emphasizers and Ten- 
derers, I would never have earned enough by public 
speaking to keep my family on oatmeal. 

However, I have no quarrel with the elocutionists so 
long as they keep to their own, and by no means unim- 
portant, sphere — the teaching of acting and dramatic 
reading. But I do not believe that they can teach a 
man how to deliver his own speech by teaching him the 
rendering of another man's oration — especially if, as is 
generally the case, the other man's composition, with 
which they coach their pupils, is in the highest form of 
dramatic poetry instead of the commonplace form of 



INTRODUCTORY. IX 

one's own discourse. Dramatic recitation is a side-show, 
public speaking is the serious business of life. In fact, 
I do not believe that the art of public speaking can be 
taught by any one, and certainly not by one who knows 
nothing about it from actual experience. I do not pro- 
fess in these pages to teach it. I am simply trying here 
to give the speaker some hints by which he shall see how 
he can teach himself. 

My subject is not elocution, or emphasis, or dramatic 
reading, or gesticulation, but public speaking. My 
object is not the training of the arms or legs, or larynx, 
or the facial muscles. My object is not to lay on rules 
from without, but to awaken the will and the instincts 
that the speaker finds within. I would induce him to 
cultivate his will, his ear for his elocution, and his eye 
for his audience. I would have him know what he is 
about, and how to make the most of himself when he 
gets upon his legs before an audience. I do not propose 
to teach him how to entertain by a display of elocu- 
tionary recitations, which is child's play, but to give him 
some suggestions that may enable him to reach, and 
move, and influence men by means of sermon, lecture, 
speech, or plea, which is man's work. "What I have 
found indispensable to myself I here publish for the 
benefit of others — of those, at any rate, who are young 
enough to be ignorant, and teachable enough to admit it. 



BEFOEE AN AUDIENCE. 



A GOOD SPEAKING VOICE TO BE ACQUIRED 
BY AN EXERCISE OF THE WILL. 

A few, a very few public speakers have what the 
public speaker needs first of all, and in many cases most 
of all — a good speaking voice, a suitable and adequate 
voice for public* speaking. A few, a very few compar- 
atively, have such a voice by Nature ; and even where 
Nature confers the blessing of a voice of adequate 
strength, she seldom adds the desirable flexibility or 
modulation. So, whether it be a stronger voice or a 
more manageable one that the speaker needs, his only 
method of acquiring it is that of willing it into his pos- 
session. I say the only method, because this is the only 
method by which the speaker is enabled to appropriate, 
and really make his own, the new and necessary voice. 
All other methods fail in this crucial test of appropria- 
tion. 

Take, for example, the method of imitative elocution. 

It proceeds upon the fallacious assumption 

that a good speaking voice may be acquired Imitatlve E1 °" 
, ..xi. • r i cution will not 

by acquiring the voice of an actor or elo- answer 

cutionist, and that in order to teach the 

art of Public Speaking you have only to teach the art of 



12 BEFOKE AST AUDIENCE. 

dramatic recitation. The failure of this method is no 
more conspicuous than the reason for the failure. The 
dramatic reader does not appropriate the voice which he 
has acquired by imitation from his " lessons in elocu- 
tion." He does not assimilate it, does not make it his 
own. He cannot converse in it. It is the voice of a 
" part," which the reciter or actor is playing. You will 
notice that the voice with which the dramatic reader 
informs the audience what he intends to read is a very 
different voice from that with which he reads. It is only 
while the student in elocution is " speaking his piece" 
under the tuition of his coacher that he speaks in the 
dignified bass or the melodious baritone. If he happens 
to discuss the method he is pursuing he will demonstrate 
its absurdity by dropping it just where it ought to be of 
service to him — in his colloquial voice. That remains as 
undignified and as unmelodious as ever, and yet that 
colloquial voice, as we propose to show hereafter, is the 
speaker's main dependence. Furthermore, the dignity 
of the recitation sounds as artificial as the want of it in 
conversation is natural. 

The preacher may succeed in manufacturing a voice of 
some merit while imitating the elocutionist who drills 
him into, or drills into him, the voice of the ideal 
Hamlet. But when the preacher ceases to appear in his 
" part" and reappears in his pulpit, he reappears in his 
own voice, which may sound more like the 

e /ft 10 " vulgar falsetto of the grave-diggers than 
ogy of the & & && 

Voice of no the well-bred baritone of the Prince of 
Use to those Denmark. 

who would ;N or does the public speaker need les- 

ea ™ ?™ ° sons in bronchial anatomy in order to learn 

how to create a good speaking voice. The 

anatomical illustrations in the books on elocution are of 



A GOOD SPEAKING VOICE. 13 

no more consequence than their triangles alive with tad- 
poles, or their pictorial examples in the awful art of 
gesticulation. A chart of the windpipe is of no more 
value to the public speaker than a picture of a bagpipe 
is to the opera- singer. 

The Public Speaker has no use for the physiology of 
the voice. It is quite immaterial to him whether his 
voice is produced by the larynx or the calf of the leg. 
It is not of the slightest assistance to him to be informed 
that " nasality is produced by the lowering of the velum 
on one side and the lifting up of the base of the tongue 
on the other." He will get rid of his nasality, not by 
talking about it, but by talking without it. The only 
way to avoid it is — to avoid it. No drunkard was ever 
reformed by a diagnosis of delirium tremens. If there 
is no will of his own to appeal to, no appeal will be of 
any avail. You may make him weep, bat you cannot 
make him act. You cannot reach a bad habit unless you 
set the will against it. A bad voice is a bad habit, to 
be got rid of just as any other bad habit is to be got rid 
of, by turning the will upon it ; a good voice is a good 
habit to be acquired, just as any other good habit is to 
be acquired, by setting the will to acquire it. If your 
voice has a tendency to go up, you are to do with it just 
as you should do with your elbow if it has a tendency to ' 
go up at the table— put it down and keep it down by an 
exercise of the will. Will it down, and put it down, 
and keep it down until it stays down without a conscious 
exercise of the will. 

You canno* acquire an adequate and The Sin g in £ 

t t . .1 . . Voice will not 

enduring speaking voice by acquiring an 

& r ^ j ^ ^ answer. 

adequate and occasional singing voice. 

The speaker's voice is a perpetual voice for perpetual 

use — the singer's and the elocutionist's is an occasional 



14 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

voice for occasional exhibition. The elocutionist's voice 
is the voice of the elocutionist, the singer's that of the 
singer, the speaker's that of the man. So that no more 
dependence can be placed on lessons in singing than on 
lessons in imitative elocution, or dramatic recitation, for 
creating a competent speaking voice, since the speaker 
must have a voice of his own, and that he cannot have 
unless he has a will of his own. 

Here again how different the two voices — the voice of 
the preacher when he " leads the singing" and the voice 
of the same preacher when he reads the hymn, or de- 
claims his sermon, or reads his " notices" ! A good 
singing voice is not a good speaking voice. They are 
entirely different voices. 

But, while we are careful to observe just where these 
two arts (singing and speaking) part company, let us be 
equally careful to observe how far and in what respects 
they travel together. Where there's a will there's a 
way in both arts, and in all arts. 

As the singer's new depths of voice gradually come 
into his possession, so that he finally uses them without 
much of an effort of the will, so the new reaches of voice 
acquired by the speaker as the reward of many dogged 
exertions of the will come at last as unconsciously as 
breathing. The singer sings in his acquired voice only 
when he sings, which is once in a while ; the speaker 
speaks in his acquired voice whenever he speaks, which 
is whenever he speaks in public or private, which is 
about all the time. 

But one lesson we may learn from these kindred but 
differently acquired arts — they are made to turn upon 
the acquisition of a suitable voice. Singers and actors, 
or, rather, their trainers, make everything of the voice. 
They put their pupils through a laborious and protracted 



A GOOD SPEAKING VOICE. 15 

discipline in order to exorcise a bad voice and substitute 
a good one, or to build up an incompetent voice into one 
of adequacy and efficiency. But alas ! what singers 
value we resign. What can be attained in every other 
art only by wearisome and exacting discipline may be 
attained in public speaking, we are told, by ' ' forgetting 
yourself and thinking only of your subject !" 

The pupil in vocal music " practises" occasionally, the 
pupil in public speaking must " practise" speak in the 
incessantly ; that is, he is to speak in the Tones which 
coveted tones whenever he speaks, wheth- y° u wisn to 
er in public or in private. And as, on the cqmre. 

one hand, the pupil in singing may talk in whatever 
voice he chooses so long as he sticks to his u part" while 
singing, so, on the other hand, the pupil in speaking will 
find that however much or well he may sing in a bari- 
t:ne, he will still talk in the key of the cockatoo. 

You are invariably, not occasionally, but invariably to 
use the strongest tone you can create. Joke in it and 
converse in it and shout in it and whisper in it. Yes, 
and think in it. You can think in it (after you know 
how) as easily as you can speak in it. Great actors 
know how. They go over their " part" with vehement 
reflection. The late Mrs. Siddons spent hours of silent 
meditation upon hers. It is not an occasional exercise I 
am talking about, like the " lessons in elocution" with 
which the quacks lie in wait at the pockets of preachers, 
who ought to know from experience that the root of the 
matter is in the intellect, the reason, the understanding, 
the reflective faculties, the perceptive faculties, and all 
the rest of the faculties. 

We Americans must remember that our climate is 
against us in this, as well as in some other departments 
of character development. It thins the voice as well as 



16 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

•the cheeks, and attenuates our tones as well as our phy- 
sique. The French books on the voice call our nasality 
an infirmity, and classify it with lisping and stammering. 
They say it is congenital, and is sometimes produced by 
an injury to the brain or a defect in the organs of speech. 
Their nasality is the real one. They really do sing 
through their noses. Our nasal passage is closed while 
we produce the misnamed nasal sounds. This can easily 
be proved by holding your nose while you speak. 
However, this so-called American nasality was common 
enough in England before there were any United States 
Americans. Macaulay speaks of, and covertly explains 
while he speaks of " the nasal psalmody of the Puri- 
tans." It was an hereditary hna- -.Kite with something 
besides the climate in its origin, and is now in use 
among those who are unconscious of both its use and 
its history. It comes under the head of "'-reversion," 
and the sooner it is dispensed with the better for both 
the cause of sincerity and the art of public speaking. 

But whatever be its name, or nature, or origin, or 
cause, this offensive tone ar cry other offensive rone 

can only be effectively and permanently removed by will- 
ing its removal. It is sufficient for the elocutionist and 
actor and singer to get rid of it occasionally, and even 
then only by a use of the will ; but the public speaker 
must rid himself of it perpetually, since it is perpetually 
that his art calls for its removal. 

This new voice is a new language, 

Acquiring a and should be desired and acquired as 

New voice is such. It necessitates pains and thought 

like Acquiring _ ,,..,.:,,. 

a New anc * consecration and continuity like that 

Language. bestowed upon the acquisition of any 

other foreign language, and, like every 

other foreign language, you will never learn to con- 






A GOOD SPEAKING VOICE. 17 

verse in it or speak in public in it unless yon talk in it 
incessantly. 

In spite of your utmost exertions it will slip away 
from you often before you get hold of it permanently. 
You will forget and forget and forget this lesson in self- 
discipline and self-drill, and knowing what you and your 
voice are about, and find yourself saying, " How are 
you ?" or, " What a hot summer we are having !" or, 
" Let us sing the forty-fifth hymn," or, " May it please 
the Court, Gentlemen of the Jury," in the old natural 
falsetto which came to you through negligence, instead 
of the new and equally natural baritone which comes to 
you by the use of the will and knowing what you and 
your voice are about. 

The value of a vigorous, flexible, mellow baritone for 
public speaking cannot be overestimated. It is a richly 
paying investment. It covers a multitude of minor sins. 
It compensates somewhat for deficiencies in rhetoric and 
thought. There is health in it, and dignity and manli- 
ness and character. 

This method of cultivating the voice leads to the culti- 
vation of an ear for it. Without such an 
ear for his voice, the speaker will know Cultivate an 
no more about the deficiencies of his own voice, 
voice than any other deaf person knows 
about the deficiencies of his. Command over the voice 
is impossible without familiarity with it. The deaf mute 
is mute from ignorance of his vocal organs. He does 
not know that he has the organs of speech, much less 
the power to exercise them. It is only recently that an 
attempt has been made to remove this ignorance and 
aw m this sei >ower— or, in other words, to get 

at nd get hold of and induce the mute to lay hold of his 
will. Much of evailing indistinctness is owing to 



18 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

a similar ignorance. The speaker has never made the 
acquaintance of his own voice. Like the deaf person, 
he does not know where it is going, or where it is failing 
to go, what it is doing, or what it is failing to do. 

He is so " earnest" and " pious" and so " absorbed in 
his subject" that his subject is absorbed by his windpipe. 
He cannot hear himself as others hear him. The first 
time, however, that a really earnest speaker, especially 
if he is a preacher, and one who is rationally absorbed in 
his subject, hears his own voice, he will be open to con- 
viction on the subject of its deficiencies and ineffi- 
ciencies. 

The speaker can have command • r his voice only by 
familiarity with it — with its capacity and incapacity, its 
successes and its failures. His first attempt to listen to 
it will convince him of his ignorance of it. Qn< 
primary elements of the elocutionary instinct is a good 
ear for your own voice. And this ear for his own voice 
is indispensable to the speaker, a^ui js ouoocptibie of a 
high degree of cultivation. Contrariwise the neglect of 
this ear, especially in early life, is disastrous in the ex- 
treme. 

We are to remember that the tones of the voice are 
somewhat the result of temperament. Those of Sir 
Charles Manners were. The " order" that he compelled 
in the House of Commons was in the voice that called 
for it. Now the temperament may be controlled, 
changed even by an exercise of the will. The history 
of religious sects prove that. It ought to be very much 
less of an undertaking to regulai e and modulate the 
voice than to reconstruct the entire constitution, mcr 1, 
moral, and physical, as has been done by the follov rs 
of George Fox and John Knox. 



II. 

ARTICULATION TO BE ACQUIEED BY AN 
EXERCISE OF THE WILL. 

Articulation deserves a chapter of its own, as it cer- 
tainly deserves a treatment of its own at the hands, or, 
rather, mouth, of any man or woman who seeks a living 
or renown by means of the most perplexing and elusive 
of the arts — the art of public speaking. 

It is impossible to overstate the importance of a good, 
trustworthy, uniform articulation to the public speaker. 
He can have no more useful form of ability than audi- 
bility. Distinctness is vital, indistinctness is fatal. And 
the defect of indistinctness is as common as it is radical. 
It is more complained of than any other defect known 
to the audience-room except the audience-room itself, of 

which we shall speak emphatically here- 
- % r r j The vke of 

atter ' Indistinctness. 

Illustrations and examples of the pre- 
vailing vice of indistinctness in public speaking are 
abundant. A few will answer our purpose. This one 
is taken from The Times (London) : 

To the Editor of the Times : 

Sir : In reference to Mr. G-. H. Moore's letter in 
your journal of this day, I beg to state that, though Mr. 
Moore began his speech in a deliberate and audible 
manner, he afterward broke into a rapid style of utter- 
ance, and many of his words were spoken in so low a 



20 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

tone that they could not be perfectly heard by any one 
at a distance. Mr. Moore must know that he did not 
make himself always understood, for an hon. member 
sitting near him asked at one part of his speech what it 
was that he said, and thereupon Mr. Moore repeated the 
words. 

March 10. Your Reporter. 

Another hon. member hopes the editor " will allow 
him to make two corrections in the report of his speech 
— a much better report than my rapidity of utterance (a 
defect which I will endeavor to correct) would entitle me 
to obtain." Other M.P.'s are not so tractable under 
this criticism. I have known an old lord to be highly 
nettled, indeed, to think that anybody should presume 
to question his audibility. Whenever Count Beust rose 
to speak in the Austrian Parliament, members who 
wished to hear him were obliged to collect around him, 
and we are told that " the scene represented more a 
private conference than the public discussions of a Par- 
liament." 

I will undertake to say that of the thousands of 

preachers, lawyers, and lecturers who have this slovenly 

precipitancy, not a baker's-dozen would, in the first 

place, join this Member of Parliament in admitting it. 

How, then, can they, in the second place, " endeavor to 

correct it" ? How is the habit of indis- 
Indistinctness ... -, j 1 1 _ 

is a Ph sical tmctness to be cured, unlegsyou know 

Defect and what your voice is about ? ^-2^ 

Distinctness Indistinctness is a physical defect, ana 

a Physical distinctness is a physical attainment, and 

ainmen . ^ e one j s j- ^ re moved and the other 

acquired, not by " forgetting yourself and thinking only 

of your subject," but by remembering yourself and 



ARTICULATION TO BE ACQUIRED. 21 

thinking of your object, by an exercise of the will, by 
turning an ear upon your own voice, by knowing what 
you and your larynx are about. Indistinctness is as 
natural, too, as it is common and injurious. It is a part 
of that natural elocution which comes to us when we get 
upon our legs before an audience. It is as natural for 
some of us (your humble servant, for example) to be 
inarticulate, indistinct, precipitate, as it is for some 
others of us to be free from this defect — Gladstone, for 
example, and John Bright, and Spurgeon, and Dr. Lid- 
don, and Wendell Phillips, and Charles Sumner, and 
Henry Clay, and the late Mrs. Siddons, and Edwin 
Forrest, and Charlotte Cushman. These all were 
endowed by nature with a physical apparatus wonder- 
fully well adapted for articulation or enunciation. 

Chatham was noted for his distinct articulation, which 

was a physical attainment cultivated with 

.-, . TT . i . j Noteworthy 

assiduous pains. His whisper penetrated « . 

r a . Examples. 

everywhere, and his full voice was over- 
whelming. " The sound rose like the swell of the organ 
of a great cathedral, and shook the house with its peal." 
But whatever he was, he was always distinct, articulate. 

The late Mr. Grote, the historian, was entirely in- 
debted to his distinctness for the hearing he received. 
That one excellence made acceptable subject matter 
which would otherwise have failed to arrest attention. 
That one excellence he maintained by the use of his will, 
by resolution-, by knowing what he was about, by making 
the most of himself, however little there was of himself. 
The less there is of yourself the more need for you to 
make the most of what there is of you. 

Plunkett overcame his stutter by turning his will upon 
it, not by forgetting himself and thinking only of his 
subject, but by recollecting himself and thinking seri- 



22 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

ously of his impediment. He could not speak rapidly 
without stuttering, and this compulsory self-restraint 
made him deliberate and distinct where many another 
speaker, who had no such impediment, for want of know- 
ing what he was about would be a failure through indis- 
tinctness. 

The catarrhal tone of the American is heard farther 
and more easily than the asthmatic tone of the English- 
man, because it is more penetrating. Articulation comes 
easier to the " Connecticut treble" than to the German 
guttural. Women excel men in articulation for the 
same reason : they have a thinner voice and a longer 
cadence. Hence indistinctness is less excusable in the 
ladies and the Americans than it is in the British 
Islander. One of the most accomplished articulators of 
our age was a woman — Charlotte Cushman. 

Charlotte Cushman tells us that " many young candi- 
dates for the stage say to her : ' We are fin- 

p a L ro ^ ished in elocution, what next shall we do ? ' 
Cushman s 7 

Articulation. ' Elocution ? ' I reply, ' I don't know what 
it is. I never studied elocution ! God 
gave me a mouth of peculiar conformation, which enables 
me without an effort to make a whisper heard to the re- 
motest corner of a large auditorium.' " I can testify to 
the truth of this ; but I should like to see Miss Cushman 
try her mouth on the large auditorium of an oblong, level- 
floored, high-ceiling church. My word for it, she would 
be caught up by a whirlwind of whispers that would 
whirl memory from its seat in her distracted brain. 

Miss Cushman continues : " He gave me a demon- 1 
strative soul, and a power to express it. Whatever I. 
feel, 1 speak just as I feel it, with the passion, the utter-' 
ance which nature dictates. That is all I know about 
elocution." 







ARTICULATION TO BE ACQUIRED. 23 

God gave Charlotte Cushman a mouth large enough 
and a soul demonstrative enough for a large auditorium, 
but how about those of us who have the demonstrative 
soul without the adequate mouth ? They must make up 
the deficiency by creating the mouth essential for their 
purpose. If the speaker is not endowed by God or his 
ancestors with the " peculiar conformation which enables 
him without an effort to make himself heard," he must 
endow himself with it. If God did not give him an 
adequate mouth, he must make the most of his inade- 
quate one ; in other words, he must make his mouth 
adequate or close it and quit, for his demonstrative soul 
alone will not save him or be saved itself. 

Neither Demosthenes nor Edmund Kean were en- 
dowed from on high with Miss Cushman's or Henry 
Clay's large oratorical mouth or peculiar conformation ; 
but they were both abundant in " demonstrative soul 
and the power to express it." And it was not by simply 
being in earnest and absorbed in their subject ; it was 
only by an effort of the will, conscious, energetic, and 
persistent, that they were enabled to make themselves 
distinctly heard. Curran was quite right when he 
declared that his shrill and fractious voice was " in a 
state of nature," and he was quite right in resolving to 
bring it out of a state of nature into a state of efficiency, 
which he did by bringing his will to bear upon it. 

The M.P. from whom I have quoted confesses to his 
" rapidity of utterance," and calls it " a defect which 
he will endeavor to correct." God did not give him, or 
me, a mouth that obviates the necessity of this " correc- 
tion." And while we have " studied elocution" and do 
know what it is, and know it is utterly inadequate and 
frivolous as far as public speaking is concerned, we do 
also know that Demosthenes, and some of the rest of us. 



24 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

have had to go through considerable discipline, and 
study, and " effort," and exercise of the will, in order 
to make even a tolerably strong tone " heard to the 
remotest corner of a large auditorium." This disposes of 
two extreme and extremely fallacious opinions, the one 
that nothing can be done to remedy this defect, and the 
other that what is to be done is to " study elocution." 
Something had to be done in the case of Demosthenes and 
myself, although nothing need be done in the case of 
Miss Cushman. Her will is relieved of this duty, and 
may apply itself to others ; your will must apply itself 
to the remedy of this disease, the removal of this impedi- 
ment ; for that is what it is — an impediment in speech. 
The student in public speaking cannot begin too soon 
after his voice is what is called " formed " to look after 
it with his will, and keep an anxious and 
An Illustration a ] ert ear U p 0n jj # Like every other habit, 

Admonition. ^ ia ^ °^ indistinctness or slovenliness of 
delivery will grow with the growth and 
strengthen with the strength. A case in point occurs to 
me. It will serve as an illustration and an admonition. 
It is that of a preacher who had this habit of indistinct- 
ness while a student, but would give np heed to criticism. 
Pie considered such matters beneath one so much " in 
earnest" and so pious. He resented all interference by 
the critics of the debating society in college, and we 
need not be surprised to learn that he is now morbidly 
sensitive to the criticisms of his articulation, or, rather, 
his want of it. Now, this wretched mortal comes up to 
the severest requirements of the ordaining clergy. He 
is " in earnest. " He is pious. He prays. He preaches 
" the Gospel." He " throws his whole heart and soul 
into his work." He " forgets himself and thinks only 
of his subject." 



ARTICULATION TO BE ACQUIRED. 25 

He has a " demonstrative soul" and power enough, 
but not mouth enough, to express it. He is a graduate 
of the recitation system of education and an educated 
man in spite of it. He uses good rhetoric, and writes a 
good sermon, and it has been long enough since he was 
weaned by the theological seminary for him to dispense 
the sincere milk of the Word without depending ex- 
clusively upon his volume of theological lectures for 
it. He had the critical fine-tooth comb passed through 
his " class sermons." Nay more, in all probability, as 
in several such cases, he has been the victim of misplaced 
elocutionary confidence, and has taken expensive lessons 
in cheap dramatics, and can " render" certain passages 
of Shakespeare with almost as much imitative skill as his 
coacher. And yet this elaborately and expensively 
equipped preacher is afflicted with, and afflicts his 
hearers with one of the most defective and therefore 
ineffective styles of elocution known to public speaking. 
His elocutionary instinct and judgment and taste are all 
at their lowest point of development. They could 
hardly be lower. His ear is a stranger to his own voice. 
His will is useless to him. It is torpid. He " rows 
wild," which proves that he had the wrong coacher. 
So there he is, in spite of all his " heart" and " soul " 
and " earnestness," his lessons in " sacred (!) rhetoric" 
and imitative emphasis and gesticulatory gymnastics ; 
there he is, tripped, balked, and thrown perpetually by 
a defect but for which he would have been one hundred 
times as effective a preacher as he is. Is the defect 
worth getting rid of ? Is its removal worth an effort ? 
And if he will not or cannot correct it, should not 
younger and more rational, even if less " earnest" men 
be forewarned of it and forearmed against it ? Can this 
be done by the study of hermeneutics any more than by 



26 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

the study of mathematics ? by praying for W hi tefi eld's 
earnestness any more than by praying for Miss Cush- 
man's mouth ? 

So far from earnestness being a guarantee of distinct- 
ness, it is often a cause of indistinctness. In fact, there 
is no more appropriate name for this well- 

nar 1 u a ^. i universal disease of public speakers 
Earnestness. . - . , « f 

than inarticulate earnestness. My news- 
paper says in its Congressional report: "Mr. Herbert, 
of Alabama, opened the discussion to-day with a speech 
in opposition to the report. Like most of Mr. Herbert's 
speeches which appear in the Record^ the effort of the 
Alabama member was made in unhappy, explosive, and 
over -emphatic oratorical style, which gave his delivery 
the effect of indistinctness" — the effect of earnestness 
and indistinctness. 

Those who are most in earnest, or most intense, or 
most absorbed in their subject, are oftentimes the most 
inarticulate, indistinct, precipitate, slovenly in enuncia- 
tion. In proportion to their eagerness to be heard is 
their inability to make themselves heard. In proportion 
to the importance they attach to what they say is the 
difficulty of hearing what they say. This ludicrous pan- 
tomime is acted in thousands of pulpits every Sunday. 
The awfully earnest preacher will even burst into tears 
in the process of uttering the inarticulate sentiment 
which has affected him so deeply. If you would make 
your hearer cry, you mast cry yourself, certainly ; but 
if you would let your hearer know what you are crying 
about, you must — tell him ! With a purely lachrymosal 
religion, the former is sufficient ; but if you wish to 
inculcate a religion that will compel a man to not only 
weep over his sins in his pew, but abandon them at the 
counter, the latter is the better method. The speaker's 



ARTICULATION TO BE ACQUIRED. 27 

emotions should be as intelligible as his thoughts, and 

will be if he is not so deeply " absorbed in his subject" 

as to secrete it by an overworked lachrymal gland. 

Another function of the will in public speaking is to 

compel the lips to form the words and the _ , ,* 

, Compel the 

throat to make the tones. Ihis is mdis- Lips t0 Form 

pensable to a good articulation. No words the Words and 

formed by the throat can be articulate. tlie Throat to 

The attempt to form both the tones and Cr !f te the 
1 . , Tones. 

the words by the throat is a habit of in- 
articulate earnestness. It is so " absorbed in its sub- 
ject," and so intent upon " being natural," that it takes 
no account of this fundamental law of nature. To obey 
it will require an exercise of the will to which the " earn- 
est " speaker has hitherto been a stranger. This so far 
from being the child's play of lessons in dramatic elocu- 
tion is a man's work in self-discipline and self-culture. 

So here is your method of curing the wretched mortal 
whom we are diagnosing. Disease — indis- 
tinctness, precipitancy, slurring, slovenli- Elocution is a 
ness, failing to be distinctly heard whether ^ ac p 61 ™ 2 , y 
he read a notice or a sermon, everybody Disorder, 
whispering, " What did he say?" — in a 
word, inarticulate earnestness. Remedy — lessons in elo- 
cutionary emphatics and theatrics, diagrams of the dia- 
phragm and the windpipe, and illustrations of " the 
rising and falling inflections," and the " rendering" of 
u princes, potentates, and warriors. 1 ' Learn how to 
speak one such piece with deliberation and distinctness, 
and you will learn how to. deliver distinctly and deliber- 
ately a Fourth-of-July oration, or a sermon on repent- 
ance, or an address to a jury ! 

There are preachers, scores of them, who give five 
dollars a lesson for such twaddle as this, and is there one 



28 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

that will give one cent, or even thank you, for telling 
him that his most serious obstacle is indistinctness, pre- 
cipitancy, and the like, and that it is a physical obstacle, 
and only to be cured by consciousness of it, by turning 
the will upon it, by knowing what he is about, he and 
his epiglottis, he and his words and tones, thoughts and 
metaphors. 

Will he heed if he is told that he can only get this 
obstacle out of the way by willing it away, by turning 
his ear upon his voice, by watchfulness, by carefulness 
and drill and discipline that shall take hold strong 
enough, and hold on long enough to root out, and kick 
out, and keep out forever and ever this pernicious habit 
of inarticulate earnestness ? No, he will not heed, 
because there is no romance about this remedy, it is too 
doggedly matter-of-fact. There is no gratification of a. 
silly boyish vanity which delights, as all little boys and 
big boys do, in learning how to declaim, and emphasize, 
and strike attitudes, and make gestures, and all that sort 
of thing. Above all, it does not tost money, it costs 
only self -conquest, which I think Solomon would join 
me in saying is greater than the conquest of the reading 
of " Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn." 



III. 

PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. 

With an adequate use of his will, an adequate know- 
ing what he is about, the speaker will make a right use 
of his physical organization — will be physically, as well 
as morally or spiritually, in earnest. If he makes no use 
of his will, forgets it and " thinks only of his subject," 
or of the laws of emphasis taught by the elocution books, 
he will make no use, or he will make a misuse of his 
physical organization. If the will be dormant, the phys- 
ical organization will be no assistance to him, will be a 
hindrance to him the rather. An inert physical organi- 
zation is, indeed, conclusive evidence of a torpid will. 
Can there be a moj*e conclusive proof that the under- 
standing of the speaker comes miserably short of its duty 
than the fact that it takes no account of physical earnest- 
ness, or the working of the body to the advantage of the 
mind, or the creating of a voice for the service of the 
intellect ? 

We are always to bear in mind that an impression is 
produced by the speaker quite apart from and often in 
spite of the words he utters. It is a mes- 
meric influence, it is feeling, reflection, An Animal 
thought produced by the animal galvanic J Gavamc 
battery on two legs. An influence goes Two Legs. 
out of the speaker into the hearer. Some- 
thing went out of Bonaparte into his soldiers ; so his 
soldiers said. Doubtless the great warrior was a great 



30 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

animal galvanic battery on two legs, or six legs, counting 
the horse's. 

I have no doubt Shiel found it greatly to the advan- 
tage of his animal galvanic battery on two legs to leap to 
his legs as he did, and rush to the clerk's table and 
pound it. Or, perhaps, he did it to cover his confusion 
or overcome his stage-fright, which is the curse of many 
a speaker who is criticised for presumption and conceit. 
Mr. Gladstone has something of the same habit. He 
springs to the box with greyhound agility, reminding 
one of a greyhound in the leash, and claps the box with 
the palm of his hand. Disraeli once brought down the 
house by congratulating himself that the clerk's table 
formed an insurmountable barrier between him and the 
Right Hon. gentleman. 

Sir Robert Peel struck the box on the table, we are 
told, about twice a minute, and " as the box was remark- 
able for its acoustic properties, the sound was distinctly 
heard in every part of the House, and considerably aided 
the effect of his speech." Then he could " look as 
solemn as though he were commissioned to stand up and 
proclaim that the world has come to an end." 

Never allow yourself to go physically to sleep if you 
expect to keep yourself mentally awake. 

There is fallacy and mischief in tracing all the short- 
comings of the preacher to his deficiency in moral or 

Moral Earnest- S P iritual eat,nestness > in always nagging 

ness which is the candidate at his ordination with hav- 

common ing no more conscience than Red Cloud 

enough is attributes to his friend the enemy who 

enoug . j g go destitute of lands and mines that the 

Black Hills must be ours, forcibly if we can, peaceably 

if we must. The " charge to the candidate," as well as 

the ordination sermon, seems to take for granted what the 



PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. 31 

agricultural brethren say they do take for granted, that 
the young parson leaves his piety behind him when he 
emerges from the recitation-room. Hence, say they, his 
lack of " earnestness." They mean energy, snap, animal 
galvanism, and all that species of qualification which is 
implied in the "call." They mean that he has ceased 
to be, if he ever was, an animal galvanic battery on two 
legs, and unless he is that he is all vanity and a striving 
after wind. The " charge to the candidate" sounds 
more like the apprehensive counsels of an old missionary 
to his " native preachers" than w^hat we would naturally 
expect to hear a Christian son of ten generations of 
Christians use to another Christian son of ten generations 
of Christians. 

Both the agricultural and the ordaining brethren are 
confounding moral with physical earnestness. No, the 
defect of the young neophyte is not moral or spiritual, 
it is physical ; though it would be fair enough to say that 
the defect on the part of his theological trainers is moral, 
very moral and very grave. They have loaded him with 
tools and have not taught him the use of them. They 
have put so much learning into his head that he was 
obliged to take out his brains to make room for it. They 
have never once suggested to him that he has any will, 
or galvanic battery, or physical apparatus for rightly di- 
viding the bread of life, or that he had better make the 
acquaintance of his own voice, and find out what he and 
his epiglottis are about when he gets upon his legs be- 
fore an audience. He knows his lessons in " Sacred 
Rhetoric," though he could not tell for the life of him 
why it is "sacred," and has passed his examination in 
Syriac — what more does he want ? And what more can 
the ordaining clergy and the rural laity demand ? 

He is not defective in the moral qualities which are 



32 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

brought to his attention with such lugubrious solicitude. 
As a general rule, he is not fatally deficient in intel- 
lectual qualifications — or if he is, why is he allowed to 
graduate ? Here is where all this moral solicitude might 
come in to advantage. No. The wretched mortal will, 
as a rule, do as well as he knows. His difficulty is in 
his ignorance of what he should know, for which he, 
instead of his instructors, is visited with the apprehen- 
sions and reprehensions of his agricultural brethren. 
He has been (professedly) in training for a life of public 
speaking, for the art of winning souls, the art of fishing 
for men by means of public appeal ; and he knows no 
more about how to use these means than a physician 
would know about how to use his remedies if he had 
never seen them or heard of them. What else can you 
expect of the wretched mortal, after he has been so long 
and painstakingly taught that he only had to let himself 
alone, in order to graduate an effective preacher ; that 
he must forget himself, and think only of his subject ; 
that all he had to do was to do nothing ? 
Th ph . . Another way of putting this panacea 
not the f° r the wretched preacher's defect or 
Spiritual Heart failure is to "charge" him with " want 
^ Needs a^ f heart/' If he will only " throw his 
an £ e * whole heart" into his sermons he will 
make a successful preacher. If that be true every un- 
successful preacher has failed for want of sincerity, or 
common honesty, and every successful preacher has suc- 
ceeded because he was so much superior to his fellows 
in honesty and sincerity ; for the heart meant here is 
the moral nature. The statement is its own refuta- 
tion. What the unsuccessful preacher needs is not 
more heart in the spiritual, but more heart in the 
physical sense. He does throw his whole soul, but not 



PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. 33 

his whole body, into his wort. He does not make the 
most of himself. 

An English newspaper, complaining of the preachers 
of the Church of England, says : " Take a Methodist 
preacher who has something to say and says it with all 
his heart, set him down in village or city, and he will in 
a short time fill the commonest and baldest barn. Let a 
Church of England minister display the same enthusiasm, 
and he will have as much success." 

The Methodist preacher " says it with all his" body, 
and if the Church of England preacher should " display 
the same enthusiasm," it would be a physical enthusiasm, 
which is just the kind of " enthusiasm," alias " earnest- 
ness," which the latter is deficient in, and which twenty- 
seven thousand four hundred and fifty -two other 
preachers are deficient in. They do not say it with all 
their physical heart. The preachers instanced here as 
examples of " heart" are examples of what self-rousing, 
self-incitement, physical animation, knowing what you 
are about, however comes that knowledge, will do 
toward firing the " heart" and soul and mind and all 
that side of a man's nature. The difference between 
two such, or any two preachers, might turn upon " say- 
ing it" or not " saying it with the whole" voice, which 
is a physical qualification. It is said that such people as 
the pioneer preachers address can be moved only by 
preachers who " throw their whole souls into their 
work" — who throw their whole bodies into their work 
is what you mean ; else their " whole souls" must be 
very much superior to the " whole souls" of their better 
educated brethren. It is not necessary to join in the 
apprehensions of the ordaining or the agricultural 
brethren, and accuse those better educated preachers of 
having " no soul" or " heart" in their work. They 



34 BEFORE AH AUDIENCE. 

have as much spiritual or moral heart in their work as 
their unclassically educated brethren, but they have less 
physical heart in it. They are all soul and no body. In 
educating their minds they have paralyzed their hearts. 
They have gained the whole world and lost their bodies. 
A good preacher once asked me what I thought he 
needed most to make his speaking more effective. 
" Put one thing into your style," I said, " and I'll let 
you off." " What is that?" " Vivacity." He had 
an excellent bass voice and unexceptional manners, but 
he was monotonously oratund, and getting more and 
more so. Yivacity would improve his oratory and pro- 
long his pastorate. He could secure it, not by for- 
getting himself and thinking only of his subject— that 
he had done for twenty years — or by five-dollar lessons 
in imitative elocution — those he had tried to his cost- 
he could secure vivacity by willing it into his style. 
The way to be vivacious is to be vivacious. 
Educating all The education is all done upon one side 

t r h l E ^ rth .t° Ut of the man— the inside, the intellectual 
of the Earthern . 

Vessel. sic * e — anc * ** * ai l s from not getting in some- 
thing in the way of " earnest" education 
on the physical side — the outside— which it is the fashion 
to look upon as the lower side. But it is the side toward 
the fish, and important somewhat, therefore, if the man 
is to be a fisher of men. It is the side of the emotional 
nature, which is five eighths of a speaker's, especially a 
preacher's, success. It is the side of common sense, of 
practical judgment, of mesmeric power, of vivacity, of 
unction, of adequate voice, of knowing what you are 
about. How could the June roses get through their 
education without their lower side ? So with great oaks 
and great preachers, by their roots we shall know them. 
Nature is more inexorable and more impatient with her 



PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. 35 

cabbage heads than her human heads. The former 
would die before entering upon their education, if they 
were not well-rooted and grounded at the lower side of 
their nature ; the latter live in a kind of trance long 
after the root of the matter has gone out of them, and 
left them all top. And even there vegetation dies, for 
there are no more hairs on their heads than there are 
honeysuckles on Mont Blanc. An educated minister of 
the Gospel is the only rush that can grow without mire. 
We must remember, however, that Nature never leaves 
her vegetable children to themselves, and does wean her 
intellectual children, who are expected to know what 
they are about or perish from lack of that knowledge. 
Pull up the blade that has just formed, and you will 
never have the ear, much less the full corn in the ear ; 
but a preacher can preach on and on, with no more juice, 
or sap, or nutriment, or animal life, or even vegetable 
life in him than there is in last year's bird's-nest. If 
he has his treasure in an earthen vessel, he has taken 
great pains to take out the earth before he put in the 
treasure. Is that the reason why his flock answer their 
prayer for a revival by sending f or a " revivalist," and 
bring on the " outpouring" by pouring out to hear him ? 
Is the revivalist's " earnestness" of a superior quality, 
or only of another kind ? 

All this mesmeric power of which we read so much 
and hear so much, now turning up in the 
shape of a miraculous gift from heaven in Animal 
the hands (the hands, literally) of a mes- ™l^™ 
meric doctor, and now in the familiar Away, 
ambiguity of our ancient friends, Biology 
and Psychology — all this, whatever it is, works out from 
the physical side of our nature. And whatever may be 
our superstitious notions, or scientific solutions of it, there 



36 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

it is, the most powerful constituent element" of public 
speaking, or oratory, or fishing for men, or winning souls, 
and all the way down from that to carrying an election 
for village constable. And it is this supreme element of 
power in the art of public speaking of which you gradu- 
ally and effectually deprive your student who is to 
depend upon public speaking for a livelihood. 

Is it any wonder that the agricultural congregations 
shake their heads with distrust at your Mill for Grinding 
out Preachers, and begrudge the money they are solicited 
to contribute to it ? They know that they do not breed 
all the " go" out of their thoroughbred horse. The 
education of horses increases both their speed and their 
brawn. Educated dogs are much more " in earnest," 
and much more intelligently in earnest, than their un- 
educated fellows. Culture promotes their mettle and 
masculinity. They do not decrease in avoirdupois, or 
any other kind of poise, as they increase in intellect. 
They can graduate from their training-master without 
the dyspepsia or the periodical dumps, because their 
physical earnestness is made to keep pace with their 
intellectual earnestness. How much prouder and 
grander is the voice of the high-bred mastiff than that of 
the ill-bred mongrel ? In the case of the intellectual 
animal who is educated for preaching, the intellectual is 
promoted, not only without regard to the physical, but 
at the expense of it. 

A " drawing out," indeed, it is, this cramming, ram- 
ming system of education by recitation. It draws like 
the lancet that taps a vein. It bleeds the preacher, and 
leaves him so genteel and jejune that no hearer ever gets 
a particle of invigoration or inoculation from him. His 
animal magnetism is refined away. If you should pick 
up a young fellow with a genius for public speaking in 



PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. . 37 

him, with a great show of rude force, with little home 
culture but much animal magnetism, with a large faculty 
for affecting and infecting an audience, with splendid 
physical earnestness — I say, if you should stumble upon 
such a young fellow as this, and put him through your 
Mill for Grinding out Preachers, he would drop out of 
its hopper with all his heart and virility ground out of 
him. He can dress better, perhaps, and he certainly is 
better educated than he was when he set out ; but can 
he speak better, can he speak as well, as effectively, with 
as manly a voice, with as much mesmeric power ? No, 
he cannot ; and this is the fact which the ordaining 
clergy and the agricultural laity are blindly bemoaning. 
No, it is not earnestness, in the ordinary sense, that the 
man needs. He is probably more in earnest in that 
sense than he ever was — more intellectually, morally, 
spiritually in earnest. It is physical earnestness that he 
needs; You have gorged the brain, and tapped the vein. 
You have gone into sanguinary alliance with the climate, 
and left nothing but whiteness and emaciation where 
there was once red blood and glorious flesh. Education 
as a process of emasculation ! So when the young 
preacher goes back to his friends, they throw up their 
hands in consternation and exclaim, " What in God's 
name have they been doing to him ?" For it is in God's 
name that you have done it, you know ! What has 
become of the fellow's magnificent physical earnestness, 
with which he used to sweep down upon his hearers, and 
bear them away ? It has been exchanged for education, 
instead of being the basis of it, the veins and arteries of 
it. If the battery which worked so powerfully before 
ceased to work after the education, have we not reason 
to charge the calamity upon the education ? 

Some students, however, survive this system of educa- 



38 BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

tion by enervation and come out of the Mill with some 
of the brawn which they had when they went into it. 
Those who make the worst show in recitation lose the 
least brawn in the course of it, and make the best 
speakers after they are done with it. Those public 
speakers who are none the worse for their education are 
the ones most likely to excel. The Rev. John Angell 
James was none the worse for his, and because he did 
not take to recitation he was given over for a dunce. 

" When he completed his education" (recitation ?), his 
biographer tells us, " he was remarkable for nothing but 
impetuosity, breadth of chest, and such strongly devel- 
oped pugilistic tendencies as to warrant this blunt sum- 
mary of his character : the thick-headed fool was fit for 
nothing but fighting." But he was fit for preaching as 
well as fighting, and his physical accessories were as 
valuable to him in the pulpit as they would have been in 
the wrestler's ring. 

John Bright is of the same build and temper. He 
reminds you of a great rock breasting the storm, while a 
great storm rages in his breast. 

Chancellor Thurlow was probably one of the most 
marked of that class of speakers who make up in physical 
earnestness what they lack in intellectual force. He is 
said to have " rushed like Achilles into the field, and 
dealt destruction around him more by the strength of his 
arm, the deep tones of his voice, and the lightning of 
his eye than by any peculiarity of genius." 

Are there any rules to be observed for keeping the 

health and preventing ills of the throat ? Yes. I'll 

give you a few ounces of prevention that 

ew unces i mve g rown ou f. f m y own experience. 

of Prevention. ° J r 

Dash cold water on the throat every morn- 
ing when you wash, for three hundred and sixty-five, not 



PHYSICAL EARNESTNESS. 39 

three hundred and sixty-four, mornings of the year, and 
wipe it off roughly with a coarse towel. There is noth- 
ing like this for strengthening the outside muscles and 
inside apparatus. It is three hundred and sixty-five 
ounces of prevention per annum. 

You may wear silk around the neck, but never wool. 
Silk keeps off the cutting wind without creating moist- 
ure, and it can be left off without harm. Wool heats 
and moistens, and once accustomed to it the omission of 
it is dangerous. Do not allow the collar to touch the 
throat. There should be room for two fingers between 
the collar and the throat. 

Keep your mouth shut when you are not using it for 
eating, drinking, or speaking. It is not to be used for 
breathing. Breathe through the nose. If you awake 
in the night and find your mouth open, get up and 
shut it. Besides, an open mouth indicates weakness of 
character ; keeping it closed by an exercise of the will 
strengthens the character by strengthening the will. 
Lavater calls the mouth "the seat of brutality and of 
delicacy, of sincerity and falsehood." Do not let it 
betray you. 

Straighten up and keep yourself straight. Walk up- 
right. The " shoulder braces" are of no use except to 
suggest bracing yourself up. They will not keep your 
shoulders back, but they will make you keep your 
shoulders back. They jog the will. When you 
straighten up for the first time you will find that your 
clothes do not fit you. Your trousers are too short and 
your coat won't button. The tailor measured you at 
your greatest shrinkage. This physical discipline will 
suggest and promote physical self-respect, and that in 
turn will promote moral self-respect. The attitude of 
dignity dignifies the feeling. Straightening the spine 



40 BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

stiffens the moral vertebra. The self -distrustful speaker 
is helped by a confident demeanor. Try it. 

The best thing to eat just before or just after speaking 
is a bit of half-done beefsteak and plain bread without 
butter, and if you care for anything to drink, one cup of 
good English breakfast tea. If you can drink milk with 
impunity substitute it for the tea at your after-speaking 
lunch. Eschew tobacco, and take no longer fire-water 
for your stomach's sake when you really intend it for 
your brain's sake. The occasional stimulant becomes a 
constant crutch. The speaker's depression that naturally 
follows his exaltation is only deepened and darkened by 
the use of narcotics or stimulants. Roast beef is the 
best remedy for a morbid mind. Nourishment that 
increases brawn, and not intoxicants that diminish it, are 
what the speaker needs. 

Never drink water w 7 hile you are speaking. It aggra- 
vates the thirst it is designed to quench. It is a nervous 
habit, like the handkerchief habit of the preachers. 

Sleep immediately before speaking is beyond all com- 
parison the best preparation for it. If you can snatch a 
cat-nap of ten minutes you will be greatly refreshed, but 
if you can get an hour or two of slumber on your bed in 
your night-gown, you will rise for your sermon, lecture, 
or plea with your strength renewed like that of a strong 
man to run a race or make a speech. A day's lay-off on 
the bed is the rest-cure. If the brain-workers would do 
at home what they go to Philadelphia in order to be 
compelled to do, they would save money and time, and 
accomplish by a short-cut what they seldom attain by 
these roundabout, circuitous, and overdone methods. 
Go to bed once in awhile and stay there for awhile — all 
day, two days, a week even. Why go to a penitentiary 
to do what you can do in your own home, sweet home ? 



IY. 

THE SELF-KELIANCE FOE PUBLIC SPEAKING. 

The public speaker is dependent upon himself for the 
use of his will, for knowing what he is about, for making 
the most of himself, for the physical and mental con- 
ditions essential to his success. There is an exaltation 
about public speaking peculiar to itself which shows how 
self-reliant the speaker is. There is a heat and thrill 
about it to be had from no other exercise of mind or 
body. Its highest reaches are accompanied by a delirium 
which is probably the most delightful form of intoxica- 
tion of which the human mind is capable. He who has y 
^/<once felt it will hanker after it as an old toper after his 
bottle. If there are public speakers who have none of 
this exhilaration, they may infer that they were not 
designed of heaven to do much upon earth. Their ina- 
bility to make themselves feel accounts for their being 
unable to make their hearers feel, and is perhaps a reason 
why they should cease to feel themselves " called " of 
God or man to fight it out any longer on that line. 
There is no better exercise than the physical earnestness of 
public speaking. It is as good for the liver as horseback- 
riding. A pulpit sweat is better than a Turkish bath. 
Some minds work best, most effectively, 

and expeditiously in and by the act of pub- The Indlvldu " 
,. \. a , ' 7 ,,. ,/. , ality of Public 

lie speaking, buch men are public think- sneaking- 

ers as distinguished from closet thinkers. 

As some cannot think or express their thoughts except 



42 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

in the seclusion of the study, so some are unable to think 
out their thoughts unless they speak them out. The two 
classes mix, but there are enough strongly marked men 
of each to make two separate and distinct classes of men 
who express their thoughts for the benefit of their 
fellow-men — speakers and writers. The most successful 
public speakers are supreme before an audience, but 
must take a secondary, if not twenty-secondary place 
among writers strictly so called. 

Preachers who produce the greatest immediate effect 
(which is the primary aim of preaching), as Whitefield 
and Bossuet, are not competent to cope with those who 
make a science of thinking and of publishing their 
thoughts. 

Such facts as these prove the individuality of public 
speaking, and the commanding individuality of the art 
of public speaking indicates how exclusive should be the 
devotion to it of those who wish to excel in it. And 
this suggests a reason why some who make considerable 
attainments fall short of the highest attainments in the 
art of rhetoric which Plato called " The art of ruling 
the minds of men." They are divided in their allegi- 
ance between writing and speakings or between ruling 
the minds of men by speaking and ruling them by writ- 
ing. The self-reliance for public speaking promotes this 
exclusive enthusiasm for it. Preachers who do some- 
thing besides preach, or pleaders who do something 
besides plead, or agitators who do something besides 
agitate the public mind, are not smitten with the passion 
for ruling the minds of men by public speaking, without 
which exclusive passion it is impossible for all the con- 
ditions for success in public speaking to be fulfilled. 

Chatham said : " I must sit still ; for when once I am 
up, everything in my mind comes out." What brought 



THE SELF-KELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 43 

it out ? Getting up. Sitting still kept liis mind quiet ; 

getting on his legs set his mind in motion. To say that 

Chatham's mind worked oratorically is to 

,1 , ., -, -. t ,-, . ., , The Oratorical 

say that ]t worked under the incitement ~ 

J t Temperament. 

of excitation peculiar to the act of public 
speaking. Gladstone's is another mind that works ora- 
torically, whether he express himself in a magazine 
article or in a speech from the Treasury Bench. Wher- 
ever or however he speaks, he always speaks in the fas- 
cinating rhythm of oratorical diction. He cannot talk 
at his best unless he rises to make a speech to the com- 
pany, be it small or large ; and when he does rise to 
make a speech, he talks as few other men can. He, like 
Chatham and Fox and Curran and O'Connell and White- 
field and Phillips and Clay, has the oratorical tempera- 
ment—a temperament that takes fire by the simple act of 
public speaking. It needs only to be once up in order 
to be ignited. 

Webster was endowed, like Macaulay, with an orator- 
ical diction, but failed in the oratorical temperament. 
He lacked self-reliance. He depended upon the occa- 
sion, and even when that was supplied he was liable to 
fail. Parties do not like leaders whom they have to 
nurse. The stump is a rough cradle. 

The late Lord Clarendon was another Lord 

marked instance of failure in public speak- * are ^ ° ns . 

L j.** Constitutional 

ing, from a deficiency in the self-reliance sluggishness." 
indispensable for public speaking, espe- 
cially for that of public men who would create and mould 
public opinion. " His merits," we are told, " were half 
hidden, and his usefulness greatly marred by a constitu- 
tional sluggishness which, while it saved him from errors, 
cheated him of brilliant victories and some prizes. In 
his whole career, perhaps, no episode occurred at which 



44 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

his pulse seemed to beat faster than its wont. He had 
not the temperament that would have enabled him to 
make the most of his superior powers and splendid 
experience. A little more rapidity, and Lord Claren- 
don might have died Prime-Minister." A little more 
slumber, a little more folding of the hands to sleep on 
the pulpit-desk, and you will — be an insurance agent ! 
His lordship came of a slow-blood family. A little more 
consciousness of that fact, and a little more self-reliance 
and self-excitation in consequence, is what he needed — 
a little more turning of the will upon his " constitutional 
sluggishness," a little more of that knowing what he was 
about before an audience, without which no public 
speaker can make the most of himself. 

A war minister of England advocates a scheme of 
army reorganization which, he says, " cost him many 
months of anxious thought and study so languidly," 
according to the report, " that the House was hardly 
able to realize the importance of the changes which he 
proposed. He spoke within his voice, so that it was 
necessary to listen attentively in order to hear. A little 
more boldness and ring would certainly have procured 
for the scheme more consideration." , The same anxious 
thought and study that produced the scheme would have 
procured for it the requisite boldness and ring. Speak- 
ing within the voice — that is, within its power — is the 
result of a flagging will. It is natural enough, because 
languor is as natural as anger. 

Lord John Russell tells us how the " tame and ineffec- 
tive manner" of Lord Althorp in bringing 

How Lord j n ^ 1G Coercion Bill produced a feeling of 

Derbv ScLvgq 

the Day. disgust in his followers that was Well-nigh 

mutiny, when Stanley, afterward Lord 

Derby, saved the day, and the bill, and his party by a 






THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 45 

speech that completely neutralized the " tame and in- 
effective" influence of his leader. 

" He detailed, with striking effect, the circumstances 
attending the murder of a clergyman and the agony of 
his widow, who, after seeing her husband murdered, had 
to bear in terror running knocks at the door, kept up all 
night by the miscreants who had committed the crime. 
The House became appalled and agitated at the dreadful 
picture which he placed before their eyes ; they felt for 
the sorrows of the innocent ; they were shocked at the 
dominion of assassins and robbers. When he had pro- 
duced a thrilling effect by these descriptions he turned 
upon O'Connell, who led the opposition to the measure, 
and who seemed a short time before about to achieve a 
triumph in favor of sedition and anarchy. He recalled 
to the recollection of the House of Commons that at a 
recent public meeting O'Connell had spoken of the 
House of Commons as six hundred and fifty-eight 
scoundrels. In a tempest of scorn and indignation, he 
excited the anger of the men thus designated against the 
author of the calumny. The House, which two hours 
before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was 
now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst 
of the storm which his eloquence had raised he sat down, 
having achieved one of the greatest triumphs of elo- 
quence ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of 
oratory." 

The late Lord Derby had an abundance of self -induced 
excitement. He had the oratorical temperament and a 
genius for debate. I heard the last speech he ever 
delivered, andVas impressed with the knightly bearing 
and the self-reliance of the great debater. I could see 
plainly that he was quite used to making himself come 
to time when the time came for the speech. He carried 



46 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

himself impressively. He held a roll of paper in his 
right hand, which he raised high and brought down into 
the palm of his left hand with a whack. It was a 
capital device for startling the drowsy woolsack or the 
drones in gowns. 

It would not be easy to find another man in modern 
times more exclusively, and in consequence more effec- 
tively, a public speaker than Wendell Phillips. Indeed, 
he was so rigidly and restrictedly a ruler 

Wendell £ ^ m i nc ] s f men \yj ^q ar ^ f rhetoric, 

Self-Reliance *kat ^is effectiveness ™ confined to one 
branch of that one art — that of agitator. 
And so pertinaciously and exclusively did his mind 
adhere to that department of public speaking, that he 
failed in even the department so nearly akin to it as con- 
troversy. To see Mr. Phillips fail in controversial 
public speaking, as well as in the tact and judgment 
indispensable for acting in conjunction with many men 
of many minds, was to see how narrow may be the gauge 
upon which the art of ruling the minds of men by public 
speaking may be made to run. Mr. Phillips once said 
of himself in a private chat : " I am a stirrer-up of 
things generally." That is exactly what he was, and a 
soother- down of things generally, or a judicious adjuster 
of things generally, is exactly what he was not. He was 
a born and trained agitator. 

So was Daniel ? Conn ell. Trained, I say. Mr. 
Phillips told me that he learned how to make an audi- 
ence hear and heed him by their attempt to make him 
hear and heed them. The more they would not listen 
the more he determined that they should hear what he 
had to say. It was a rare training in distinctness, in 
articulate earnestness, in the use of the will, in knowing 
what you are about, and in self-reliance. Mr. Phillips's 



THE SELF-KELIAKCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 47 

mind, not only by reason of its peculiar construction, 
but as the result of his experience with the mob, worked 
as Chatham's was said to have worked, oratorically. 
His mission was to create public opinion, not to utilize 
it. " Abrupt utterances, thrown out isolated, unex- 
plained" — the rest must be done by others. He was no 
general, but a magnificent Uhlan, our bright particular 
star of pure oratory, and as knightly pure a soul as ever 
broke a lance with a popular injustice. We bring him 
in here as an example of what a passionate and exclusive 
devotion to public speaking will accomplish, and how 
this art- — the only one used by Him who spake as never 
man spake — rewards her votaries. Indeed, it is written 
over the threshold of every art : Thou shalt have no 
other arts before Me. 

I asked Phillips w T hat he thought of Henry Yincent. 
u Pulmonary eloquence !' 5 Yincent is unfairly treated 
by this fling. We are just as much in need of his 
dramatic descriptions as we are of Phillips's conversa- 
tional invective. Yincent's day was over when he came 
to this country. His voice was cracked. Twenty-five 
years before the burly chartist was a power with his 
powerful elocution, and theatrical manner, and self- 
induced mesmerism. 

Phillips on the platform was an elegant gentleman 
conversing with his friends and lampooning his enemies. 
He was a rare instance of what the colloquial element in 
public speaking can accomplish. But he was not appre- 
ciated by untrained audiences. He required listeners 
that were accustomed to listening. 

Some who have not the oratorical tern- Make the Most 
perament have the self-reliance and will- of Yourself, 
power, which enables them to make the 
most of their faculties and attainments. These sluggish 



48 BEFORE AH AUDIEKCE. 

temperaments, which are not roused by the simple act 
of public speaking, are just the ones to whom this de- 
vice of self-excitation is immensely useful. The ora- 
torical temperament is invariably associated with physi- 
"*sj cal lassitude and indolence. It is essentially a Celtic as 
distinguished from a Teutonic temperament ; a bitumi- 
nous as opposed to an anthracite temperament. It can 
get mad or make a speech upon the slightest pro- 
vocation. It has a constitutional aversion for manual 
labor, for all physical exertion, indeed, except that 
induced by passionate emotion, whether it take the form 
of oratorical, political, or martial ambition. Oratory 

' thrives where agriculture declines. What we and the 
English boast of as extraordinary in the way of impas- 
sioned public speaking is common enough in France and 

* Italy, where indolence and eloquence go hand in hand. 
The oratorical temperament is very inflammable under 
the excitation of public speaking. " When once it is 
up,' 7 its blood is up. This is not so much or so often 
the case with the oratory of England, but it is becoming 
more and more so with that of this country, where the 
Celtic temperament is already in the ascendant, and 
where the Celtic forms of thinking and style of writing 
and speaking are destined to prevail. 

We cannot, however, share in the advantages of a 
national peculiarity unless we share in the peculiarity 
itself. If our minds do not work oratorically we must 
compel them to work as oratorically as we can. We 
must make the most of what qualifications we have, and 
the more we make of them the more we can make of 
them. If u when once we are up" nothing " in our 
minds comes out," we must devise some means for 
bringing something out, or abandon public speaking as 
the means by which we are " called " to win souls, or 



THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 49 

reform nations, or stir up things generally. A drum 

has nothing in it until it is struck. Then it is full of 

sound and fury, signifying something, signifying To 

arms — battle — victory. 

Sometimes it will happen — nay, it generally happens, 

except in political campaign speaking — that the occasion 

is dormant and the audience is dormant. ~, T7 . . r 

The Virtue of 

"What is the speaker to do under such cir- Earnestness 

cumstances ? Wait for the audience to to be Assumed 

come to life, in the hope that it will bring if you have 

him to life ? or bring himself to life, and _ ' 

. , . ,. ,.» Temperament, 

by that means bring his audience to life ? 

What brings the frogs to life in the spring ? Certainly 
the frogs do not bring themselves to life. They are 
awakened by the increase of warmth in the rays of the 
sun. So the frogs in the audience will never come to 
life until they obtain a little more, or a good deal more, 
warm light from the speaker. You may know it has 
arrived by the croaking. Better the croaking of the few 
cold frogs at your superfluous warmth, than the condem- 
nation that was visited upon the pastor of the church 
^ at Laodicea for being merely lukewarm. 

When the hearers are least interested, from either 
their familiarity with the topic or the depression of their 
surroundings, the speaker is to be most interested — 
that is, he is to show most interest, hence animation, 
physical earnestness. Showing interest will increase his' 
interest. Assuming such a virtue creates it. ., 

When you suspect that your sermon or lecture is below 
your mark, and that it will therefore be received with 
delight by those who enjoy nothing in your discourse 
except its defects, that is the time for summoning all 
your self-reliance, your physical earnestness, your will- 
power That is the time for falling back upon your 



50 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

reserves in the way of faculties and qualities which 
always stand ready to fly to your assistance when those 
which constitute your vanguard are driven in. That is 
the time to lift up your vertebrae, and your head, and 
your pluck, and your voice, and look your audience 
square in the eye, clear your throat — in a word, when 
your earthen vessel is caught and cannot bear up into the / 
wind, let her drive. Something may come of it, whereasa 
v nothing can come of doing nothing. These moments 
of contrary winds are very critical ones for the earthen 
vessel. They sometimes carry him upon the . rocks 
through the sheer helplessness and give-up of the caj)- 
tain — Captain Will. Hence the necessity for a self- 
reliance which is abundant in resources, and quick in the 
use of them, and as competent for the perilous dash as 
the safe manoeuvre. The speaker must conquer himself 
if he would conquer his audience and turn its apathy 
into interest. 

It is preposterous to say that in every other occupation , 
and profession in the world, from fox-hunting to office- 1 
hunting, a man is to make the most of him- 
Self-Reliance ge ]-j^ j^ jj^j j n p re aching a man is to see j 

*th S ' t al ■' 10W l^tle he can make of himself, his judg- 

Dependence, ment, tact, physical earnestness, and self- \ 

reliance. All squeamishness with reference 

to moving himself, in order that he may move others, the 

preacher should put away at once and forever. There 

is no quarrel between the highest sense of spiritual 

dependence and the liveliest sense of self-reliance. Both 

are inconsistent with a parson's giving an ill man reason 

for saying : " You speak of the joys of heaven in such a 

' way as to make me disgusted with them." To say that 

we must not use a tone until we have its feeling, is 

• equivalent to saying that we must not be courteous or 



THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 51 

civil until we feel like it. It is just as much the 
preacher's duty to speak in the tone and manner of 
sympathy while he is administering sympathy, regard- 
less of his own feelings, as it is our duty to behave ' 
courteously to our fellows whether we feel like it or not. 
Unless the preacher absolutely disbelieves what he says, 
he is justified in saying it, is required to say it as though 
he does believe it. No man on earth could stand the 
test of only preaching when his faith is at its highest. 
In fact, much of a preacher's scepticism is an evanescent 
mood which nothing puts to flight sooner than preach- 
ing. This mood, too, instead of arising from an inquir- 
ing mind, may arise from a sour stomach — or a stomach 
[overloaded with hot bread and ice-water, which may 
I have something to do with the low state of hunger and 
\ thirst after righteousness. 

I can recall no better illustration of how the best 
trained and most confident of public speakers may be 
thrown by the occasion than the failure of 
the felicitous and facetious Jeffrey in his A Practised 
attempt to present John Philip Kemble ^b^th 

with a gold snuff-box at a public dinner Occasion, 
at Edinburgh. 

" He rose for the purpose with full confidence in that 
extemporaneous power which had never failed him ; 
but when the dramatist raised his kingly form at the 
same instant and confronted the diminutive man with his 
magnificent obeisance — the grandest, probably, ever 
made by mortal — the most fluent of speakers was sud- 
denly struck dumb. He sat down, with his speech un- 
finished and the golden gift unpresented. " 

Sometimes the audience, utterly unsuspicious of its 
royal appearance, will assume a " kingly form" to even 
a speaker who had every reason to suppose he had con- 



52 BEFORE AS" AUDIENCE. 

ceit enough to carry him through, and strike him dumb, 
or, what is just as bad, strike him with a complication 
of bewildering phrases. 

The oratorical, like the poetical or musical organiza- 
tion, is apt to be irritable, touchy, easily thrown, and 
the public speaker needs equanimity and 
Self-Posses- p i se# j n controversy it is indispensable. 
Good-Nature ^ e debater who loses his temper loses 
the battle. Burke's wonderful force and 
brilliancy were hindered by his irritability. Lyndhurst 
was often more than a match for Brougham, with all his 
resources, by reason of his superior coolness, which was 
the result of self- discipline by the use of the will. Pitt 
kept his temper, and was kept by it. Although he 
sometimes vomited from nervousness behind the speaker's h 
chair, he never lost his balance before it. Disraeli lost 
his temper at starting out, but saw his error, and ever 
after knew what he and his temper were about. He 
never again let go the reins. He kept himself well in 
hand. 

This recalls the second Henry Grattan, who " could 
not utter a half dozen sentences without getting into 
such a passion and indulging in such violence of gesture 
that it was quite unsafe for any member to sit within 
reach of his right arm." He " forgot himself and 
thought only of his subject," did not know what he and 
his gestures were about. 

Luther said : " I never speak so well as when I am in 
a passion ;" but according to his own confession his most 
injudicious and injurious utterances grew out of his 
speaking when he was in a passion. 

1 Public speaking is depressing in proportion as it is 
I exhilarating, and is therefore necessarily followed by a 
' reaction. You tumble from great heights to correspond- 






THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 53 

ingly great depths. You cannot have the blessing with- 
out the curse involved in it. Public speaking is no 
exception to the universal rule — we die to live ; he that 
saveth himself shall lose himself, and he that devoteth 
himself must perish of the devotion. Still, you can hold 
yourself together, and break the force of the law some- 
what. But not by fooling away your time on lessons in 
emphasis, or attitudes before a looking-glass, or even by 
giving your whole time to recitations in the dead lan- 
guages. If your teachers of law and theology do not 
pay any attention to your training in the living language 
in which you are to speak, or to your judgment, or to 
your physical discipline, or to your self-restraint, you 
must give atttention to them yourself in downright, 
upright, outright earnest, or you will graduate a fool or 
a paralytic. 

It was said of Daniel O'Connell that if his feelings 
were not enlisted, his manner was cold and his voice 
monotonous, and those who never heard 
him before " would wonder how he ever O'Connell, 
could have attained so much popularity." Broueham 
They expected the public speaker to be 
what they never expect their trotting horses and laying 
hens to be — always at their best. Neither horse, hen, 
nor speaker can endure such a test. O'Connell prob- 
ably knew what he and his feelings were about, and 
kept them under the control of his will and judgment. 

Mirabeau was very appreciative of his physical acces- 
sories. He counted much upon his hideous features, his 
heavy eyebrows, his enormous brush of hair, upon his 
very ugliness. " No one knows," he said, " all the 
power of my ugliness. When I shake my terrible mane 
none dare interrupt me." He had a frightful stare, and 
covered himself with the ferocity of a polar bear ; but 



54 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

Madame de Saillant says he was " an empty bugbear." 
Perhaps nobody knew that better than himself. Every 
bully dreads the discovery of his own cowardice. Ora- 
tory is often the refuge of the craven braggart. 

Mirabeau was a good specimen of self-reliance and 
self-restraint as well as physical earnestness. He was 
slow at first, began with great deliberation, kept himself 
well in hand, made the most of himself, always knew 
what he and his savage voice were about. With all his 
storm and rage he never lost self-command or equilib- 
rium. He determined that his voice should be heard 
in all its varied inflections and cadences, and it was. He 
made a dagger of it, and thrust into his hearers, or a 
maul of it, and brought it down upon them with mash- 
ing, crashing force. 

Lord Brougham was a rare illustration of the use of 
the will in public speaking of self-reliance, and knowing 
what you are about, and making the most of yourself 
when you get upon your legs before an audience. He 
had an oratorical ambition and an oratorical tempera- 
ment. He made a study of himself and of every other 
speaker. He picked up any quality or device that he 
found in the effective barristers and preachers, and 
incorporated it in his own style. That is the way he 
secured his famous " Brougham whisper." He noticed 
that a preacher made up for the feebleness of his voice 
by lowering it at certain times on certain passages. He 
cultivated a whisper which commanded attention, but 
he knew what he and his voice were about too well to 
be always whispering. He knew when to whisper and 
when to blow upon his bugle. He knew enough to 
be dull enough when it suited his purpose. He could 
rest himself, and save himself, and husband his resources 
for the emergency. He knew, as every speaker should, 



THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 55 

where he was strong, and where weak, and in what 
kind of rhetorical harness he worked best. He was 
great in making or repelling an attack. He was a 
striking illustration of how much the combative element 
has to do with the working of the animal galvanic 
battery on two legs. His delivery expressed his mood 
and created it as well. When he rose the storm 
rose within him ; when he sat down the storm sub- 
sided. He spoke as much with his body as he did with 
his mind. And his body, like Mirabeau's, was a power- 
ful auxiliary of the mind. He had a bold forehead and 
a shaggy shock of coarse hair — a rock covered with 
thorns and briers. His nose was a huge crag, and his 
eyes glared. He was awkward, but his awkwardness 
became him. It was in keeping with his style of rhetoric 
and elocution. For such a speaker to take on the effem- 
inate graces of a Chesterfield would be to reduce him to 
— a Chesterfield. 

Whoever has made a study of our English books of 
rhetoric must have observed something of a contradiction 

in their advice with reference to the self- 

!• n i v i . T)i . Contradictions 

reliance tor public speaking. .Blair says, . , B , 

under the head of " The Pathetic Part f Rhetoric, 
of a Discourse," which might be called 
the moving part of a discourse : " The only effectual 
method (of moving others) is to be moved yourselves. 
. . . The internal emotion of the speaker adds a pathos 
to his words, his looks, his gestures, and his whole 
manner, which exerts a power almost irresistible over 
those who hear. But" — you must not be moved your- 
selves by yourselves. You must not be in the slightest 
degree self-reliant for your internal emotions— " But on 
this point, as I have had occasion before to show, all 
attempts toward becoming pathetic, when we are not 



56 BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

moved ourselves, expose us to certain ridicule. " Our 
author then refers with approval to Quintilian's descrip- 
tion of the method he pursued for moving others — i.e., 
by first moving himself ! u Quintilian, who discourses 
upon this subject with much good sense," declares that 
his "method for entering into those passions which he 
wanted to excite in others," was to " set before his own 
imagination strong pictures of the distress or indignities 
which they had suffered whose cause he was to plead." 
He " dwelt upon these till he was affected by a passion 
similar to that which the persons themselves had felt. 
To this method he attributes all the success he ever had 
in public speaking, and (Blair adds) there can be no 
doubt that whatever tends to increase an orator's sensi- 
bility will add greatly to his pathetic powers." If 
Quintilian's imaginary u pictures' ' w T ere not " attempts 
toward becoming pathetic," or being moved " when he 
was not moved himself," a method which Blair declares 
would incur ridicule, there must be some way of recon- 
ciling the positions of these two authors which 1 cannot 
discover. Blair reflected a popular fallacy upon this 
subject which was unknown to the ancients — viz., that 
because the actor is self-reliant for his emotional re- 
sources, the public speaker, especially the preacher, 
should not be. But when he, or any other English 
writer, descants upon the expression of the emotions or 
passions in language, he finds himself trying to balance 
himself on the two stools, that of exclusive dependence 
upon the occasion, and that of self-reliance when the 
occasion fails. Quintilian and Cicero had no such prej- 
udice as that which tangles the modern authorities upon 
public speaking. 

Blair says : " We must take care never to counterfeit 



THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 57 

warmth without feeling it." Here is the fallacy that all 
self-induced warmth or feeling is dishonest, and all 
warmth or feeling produced by the occasion is necessarily 
honest. " The very aspect of a large assembly attentive 
to the voice of one man is sufficient to inspire that man 
with such elevation and warmth as gives rise to strong 
impressions." Now, why should the warmth inspired 
by an audience be more honest than that inspired by his 
own reflections and imagination? But " he must not 
allow impetuosity to carry him too far." If he may 
stop his warmth, or restrain it, why may he not create 
it ? " He must not kindle too soon." If the moment 
for being kindled is under his control, why may not the 
kindling itself be subject to his will ? If he is allowed 
to say when he shall feel the emotion, why is he not 
allowed to say whether he shall feel it or not ? If 
Demosthenes, as Blair says, is to be commended for 
kindling his audience " by calling up the names of those 
who fell at Marathon," and Cicero his a by apostro- 
phizing the Alban- hills and groves," why are not De- 
mosthenes and Cicero and Dr. Blair justified in resorting 
to the same or some other devices for kindling and firing 
their own emotions ? Our teacher of the awful rules of 
rhetoric soon forgets his own rules, for he tells the 
lawyer that he must do just what he says all public 
speakers must avoid doing — assume the virtue of warmth 
if he has it not. " It has a bad effect upon his cause for 
him to appear indifferent or unmoved." If he is not 
self-reliant for his emotion, how can he avoid appearing 
unmoved ? 

Blunt, another of our setters of the public speakers to 
rights, says: " Eloquence must be the voice of one 
earnestly endeavoring to deliver his own soul." Sup- 



58 BEFORE Atf AUDTE1STCE. 

pose we have no soul to deliver, or a miserable wee 
squeak of a soul. We will squeak in delivering it. 
" Must be the outpouring of ideas rushing for vent." 
Suppose we have to speak without ideas, or those we 
have do not rush ? " Must be the Psalmist's experience, 
the untutored effort of a heart hot within till the fire 
kindles, and at the last speaks with his tongue. " Sup- 
pose we have the experience of the wretched hack of a 
lecturer who must speak, tutored or untutored, or take 
board at the poor-house. But that is not all. " It must 
be the prophet's experience, a word in the heart as a 
burning fire shut up in his bones, so that he is weary of 
forbearing and cannot stay." But how is one to have 
the experience of a Hebrew prophet if one is only an 
I American parson over a small church and a large family ? 
The self-reliance indispensable for the highest success 
in public speaking keeps the speaker superior to his sur- 
roundings, and never allows his surround- 
Keep Yourself j n g S ^ Q g e £ ^ e U pp er hand of him. He 

. u \l is not to fail because his audience does. 

to Your 

Surroundings. Let the audience be ever so small, and 
the circumstances ever so disheartening, 
he is to " come up smiling" and go through his per- 
formance with the best credit to himself — or, rather, to 
his art. This is the art spirit, and the more we are pos- 
sessed with it the higher the quality of our success, 
whatever be its quantity. The best training for speak- 
ing well under the most favorable circumstances is speak- 
ing as well as you can under the most disadvantageous 
circumstances. 

The speaker who has no self-reliance, and is entirely 
dependent upon his surroundings for his " earnestness," 
is the speaker who knows the least of how to make the 
most of his surroundings — the high tide of the occasion 



THE SELF-RELIANCE FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 59 

and the high tide of his own emotions. This provision 
against the emergency when the heaven over us is brass 
and the audience around us is brass, too, provides also 
for those tides in the affairs of men — religious, reforma- 
tory, or political — which are taken at the flood by 
preacher or agitator, and lead on to vast results. 



THE AET OF BEING NATURAL. 

Ah ! now we have it. " Be natural," and you'll be 
right. All you have to do is to do right. This is the 
one be-all and the end-all of our setters of the world to 
rights. Why should it not be the panacea for the setters 
of the speakers to rights ? It is very evident that two 
definitions of the word natural are playing leap-frog in 
the minds of those who are forever and ever prescribing 
it to preachers. One of these definitions is : The 
delivery that comes to the speaker when he gets upon 
his legs before an audience ; the other definition is : 
Graceful deportment and effectiveness of speech. The 
former is the true definition, but the latter is the pre- 
dominant one in the public mind of the speaker's critics, 
and the " little member" of the audience. This is illus- 
trated by the fact that the examples of the " natural ' : 
style pointed out for our imitation are those speakers 
who are naturally graceful and effective, while those 
who are naturally awkward and ineffective are held up 
as warnings. If there is some inconsistency with this in 
the habit of invoking John the Baptist and Saul of 
Tarsus as examples, it is only another illustration of the 
fact that the speaker's critics have a zeal of oratory, but 
not according to common sense. As well expect to 
preach in the Baptist's camel's-hair shawl. The rhetoric 
of the forerunner was as " natural " to him as his cos- 
tume. And his one-headed exhortation was as natural 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 61 

as (alas !) are our hydra-headed discourses. The crab 
and the trout are equally natural ; so are the eagle and 
the muscovy duck. 

The effective preacher is indebted to " nature" for his 
efficiency, and the ineffective preacher may complain of 
nature for his deficiency. Both are in earnest, both are 
themselves, both are full of the subject, both have faith 
(perhaps the inefficient one more than the other), and 
there is a bare possibility that the " unnatural" one 
would go down to his house every Sunday justified 
rather than the other. 

This " natural " theory is to be found in Whately's 
rhetoric. He advocates the " natural man- 
ner," and defines it as " that manner Whately's 

" Natural 
which one naturally falls into when really Manner." 

speaking in earnest — with mind exclu- 
sively intent upon what we have to say." The truth is, 
as we have seen, that the most in earnest are often the 
most ineffective, because indistinct and slovenly. They 
are " exclusively intent upon what they have to say," 
and that is the reason why they exclude all reference or 
attention from the art of saying it. Take for illustra- 
tion an example of this Archbishop Whately himself ! 
Here is his " natural manner" as described by a contem- 
porary : 

" He goes through his addresses in so clumsy and in- 
animate a way that noble lords at once come to the con- 
clusion that nothing so befits him as unbroken silence. 
He speaks in~so~Tow a tone as to be inaudible to those 
who are any distance from him. And not only is his 
voice low in its tones, but it is unpleasant from its 
monotony. In his manner (natural manner ?) there is 
not a particle of life or spirit. You would fancy his 
grace to be half asleep while speaking. You see so little 



63 BEFORE AN AUDIEXCE. 

appearance of consciousness about him that you can 
hardly help doubting whether his legs will support him 
until he has finished his address." 

If that is the maimer that naturally comes to the 
speaker whose mind is exclusively intent upon what he 
has to say, and it certainly is, would it not be well to try 
a manner that will give the speaker a little more appear- 
ance of consciousness and the audience a little more con- 
fidence in its speaker's legs ? 

Suppose you have what is called family discipline in 
your house, as your grandfather, possibly your father, 
had in his house. It would not proceed upon the idea, 
would it, that the boy should be left to adopt the 
manners that come to him ? You would not begin and 
end your instruction by saying : Be natural, my boy, 
and you will be right ; or, Be in earnest, and you will 
soon learn how to keep your feet off the chair-rung, and 
your stare off the visitor ; or, Be yourself, and you will 
never pick your teeth at the table, or your nose in the 
church. Would you not the rather take for granted 
that the manners which come to a boy when left to him- 
self and his comrades of the public school are the wrong 
ones ? And would you not endeavor by a combination 
of his will and yours to so work upon his sense of 
decorum as to give him a new set of natural manners ? 
As you would do with your naturally bad-mannered 
hoy, you should do with your naturally bad-mannered 
self if you are a preacher or a lawyer. There are a 
few speakers of whom it may be said they are justified 
in preserving and using the delivery which comes to 
them when they get upon their legs. Of every one 
of the remainder we may say their natural delivery 
is wrong, or not right, or it is more or less ineffective. 
They should somewhat change, or altogether alter, the 



. 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 63 

delivery which comes to them, or substitute another 
which they compel to come to them. 

The difficulty with most of them is that they adopt, 
acquiesce in, and hence cultivate by practice the delivery 
which comes to them, which delivery is ineffective. Or 
it is not so effective as another which they could acquire, 
if they (1) were conscious of their defect, (2) roused 
themselves to reflect upon it, and (3) set themselves to 
remedy it. 

The elocution, too, that comes to the A Natur f! 
speaker when he comes to the audience is be Ri ~h t or 
perfectly natural to him, though it may Wrong, 
be far from the most effective elocution 
for him. It may be natural and wrong. It is therefore 
his duty to acquire an elocution which will be natural 
and right. 

You say of a speaker, he does not use that elocution 
in private conversation, why does he use it in public 
speaking. His conversational elocution is natural, his 
public elocution is unnatural. No, his public elocution 
is just as natural to him as his private elocution. It is 
the elocution with its emphases and cadences that comos 
to him when he speaks in public or talks in private. 
Here is his difficulty ; he knows how to speak to a friend 
on the street, he does not know how to speak to one 
hundred friends in the hall or church. In the first 
place, he takes for granted, what has always been taken 
for granted, that the elocution of public speaking is 
radically different from the elocution of private talking. 
That is a blunder as embarrassing as it is egregious — a 
blunder, indeed, sufficient of itself to disconcert and 
throw any one who stands before an audience for the 
first time. What with the embarrassment caused by the 
presence of an audience, or audience- fright, and the 



64 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

embarrassment caused by this misapprehension, it is no 
wonder that the speaker falls into all manner of cadences 
emphatics, and theatrics, bellowings, and whisperings, 
and inarticulate earnestnesses that cleave the general ear 
without even so much as making itself intelligible to the 
general intellect. 

In private conversation the speaker may have a defec 
tive elocution from lack of will, and knowing what he 
and his elocution are about ; but in his public discourse 
his elocution is incomparably more defective for the two 
reasons that have just been given. It is a curious fad 
and another fact illustrating the individuality of the art 
of public speaking, that a man who can hardly utter a 
sentence without blundering in private will deliver a 
speech remarkably correct in syntax. Few, however, 
speak as well before an audience as they do before a 
friend or two, in the matter of elocution. 

Here we are again upon the question of constancy. 
The elocution of the actor and reader may be laid away 
when not in use ; the elocution of the speaker should be, 
must be always in use. He may practise the articula- 
tion, enunciation, the orotund voice and the ear for 
cadence and vocabulary, in his private conversation as 
well as in his public speech. 

The necessity for this is self-evident when you reflect 
that the colloquial element is the fundamental and pre- 
dominant element of all public speaking. In scientific 
lecturing, in all teaching by lecturing, it is, indeed, the 
only element. And when we remember how much of 
teaching is done by lecturing, we can form some idea of 
the importance to be attached to a distinct, vivacious, 
and vigorous colloquial elocution. It may be cultivated 
indefinitely. " He is a good talker" is a compliment 
worthy of any public speaker's ambition. From the 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 65 

colloquial elocution the speaker may rise into the dramatic 
or oratorical, but his mainstay and stronghold is the con- 
versational. 

A good elocutionary instinct is invaluable to the 
speaker, and he should learn how to disci- 
pline and regulate it. His will should The NaturaI 
have it under control, and he should not be R es - U i a t e d 
allow it to be disconcerted or embarrassed by Art. 
by the audience, or the arbitrary rules of 
the professional einphasizers. He learns the u time" 
and rhythm of speech just as the newsboy learns it — by 
the practice of the elocutionary instinct. The newsboy 
who cries his paper perfectly on the street would fail if 
asked to do it on the platform before an audience. The 
audience throws him just as it does the speaker. His 
cadences and all the cadences known to song, chant, ser- 
mon, or speech are perfectly natural. To be right they 
must be regulated by art. 

The head-notes of the American speaker are just as 
natural to him as the Briton's chest-notes are to him, or 
the German's guttural is to him just as natural as the 
climate that causes them. All the whines and twangs 
and tones and intones and cadences to which public 
speakers are addicted are perfectly natural. Nature 
gives us the cadence of the English Church clergy, the 
several American pulpit cadences, the Southern inflec- 
tion and the New England, the pioneer Methodists' and 
the scholarly Presbyterians'. From the same source we 
obtain also the intoned services of the Catholics in their 
cathedrals, and the Druids in the " vast cathedral of 
nature," the chantings in the Jewish synagogue and 
heathen temple, as well as the intonations of. the newsboy 
as he cries his paper on the street, and of the porter as 
he fills the hotel with the next train's departure, and of 



6(j BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

the dog who throws up his nose and bays at midnight in 
response to a distant salutation. 

There are places, such as the cathedrals, where the 
Italian preachers produce their powerful effects by a 
prolongation of the vowels, and outdoors, where the 
Greek orators to this day are obliged to obey the same 
law. We Americans need not speak in the undulatory 
cadences of the cathedral orators, because we do not 
speak in cathedrals. The Italian preacher is so highly 
endowed with the elocutionary instinct (as all the 
Southern and Eastern races are) that he has more variety 
and diversity in his elocution than we have with all our 
advantage of smaller place and audience. I shall re- 
member the preachers I heard, in common with twenty 
thousand persons, in St. Peter's during the (Ecumenical 
Council, so long a,s memory holds her seat. It seemed, 
indeed, as if the oratorical instinct could no farther go. 
The sentiment could be followed by following the gestic- 
ulation. 

The Greeks and Romans spoke with a strongly marked 
cadence. Their elocution of both the stage and the 
rostrum was a kind of recitative, sometimes set to music 
and accompanied by instruments. 

The reading aloud which is still common on the high- 
ways of the East is done with an undulatory cadence, 
and with a swinging of the body and head as if to keep 
time. No wonder that, as the eunuch's elocution was 
very much like that which we hear in the pulpits of our 
day, Philip should have asked the reader if he under- 
stood what he read. 

As for the religious aspect of this question, it deserves 
all the ridicule which it receives. There is only one 
thing more ludicrous about the sanctimonious whine than 
the whine itself, and that is the unconscious use of it by 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 67 

really devout and otherwise sensible men. However, 
even that is perfectly natural. It is as natural for man 
as it is for his dog to whine. No animal makes a sound 
that is not natural to him. 

The "Welsh hywl has been attributed by some writers 
to the Welsh temperament, and by a recent one — Mr. 
Owen Jones — to the same origin from which our Puritan 
forefathers were supposed to derive their " nasal 
psalmody" — viz., " the divine spirit." But tempera- 
ments far away from Wales geographically, mentally, 
and religiously are addicted to a similar cadence. It is 
nature, human nature, and that continually, and that 
everywhere. It is the instinct for doing a thing and say- 
ing a thing in the easiest possible way asserting itself in 
a man who has so much to say that it is no wonder he 
seeks, and finds, and practises the easiest possible way. 

This intonation, or cadence, or dwelling on the sylla- 
ble, or prolonging the vowel sounds, is a 

provision of nature against a contingency. A Pr0Vlsl0n of 
i , . , T , ,. ta . .. , ^P J Nature Against 

It is the elocutionary instinct exacting the a contingency 

prolongation, in order to be heard. The 
intone is easier to speak and easier to be heard. But 
it is equally natural for us to fall into the intone as 
a habit without reference to the contingency. Why ? 
Because Nature seeks her ease, as water seeks its level. 
The monotones we hear so much, and hear criticised so 
much, are universal because they are the easiest tones or 
cadences in which to make a speech in public, but not 
for making a remark in private. People say of their 
preacher : He does not whine it off in that manner when 
he converses, why should he when he preaches ? The 
answer is obvious. Nature, who takes the delivery that 
comes to her (or him), whether in pulpit or drawing- 
room, finds the staccato easiest in the latter, and the 



+ 



68 BEFOKE AN ATJDIEtfOE. 

intone easiest in the former. This intonation, or chant, 
has an ally in our indolence — in an indolent, if not an 
inert will. It is the universal way of speaking because 
it is the easiest way of speaking, and it is the easiest way 
because it is the natural way. There is an African chant 
precisely like that of the Quaker preacher. It is the 
chant that comes to preachers when they get upon their 
legs before their congregation, and simply want to " be 
natural " and forget themselves and think only of their 
subject. 

If you would know how much easier you can speak in 
the Quaker sing-song than even in your own, which 
may not be so complete or arbitrary, try it. I broke 
myself of an intone which grew out of the New England 
literary one, only to fall into another which I heard in 
Scotland. Sometimes a speaker is discredited for imita- 
tion, when he is trying to extricate himself from its 
meshes. If you have imitation large do not use it for 
the amusement of your friends. Some Americans have 
learned (unconsciously) to drop their H's by imitating 
that defect in the English. And let it never be for- 
gotten that where they drop one H, we drop one hun- 
dred and one other little matters and things of the 
highest importance in elocution, such as ed, ing, ow, 
etc. No American pronounces his r or er. If you 
doubt this, listen when you try to say North or New 
York. Let us take the beams out of Jonathan's mouth, 
that he may have more excuse for taking the motes out 
of John's. This is done by turning the will upon our 
mouths, and keeping it turned thitherward until the 
remedy is effected. Keep the will away from the bron- 
chitis, but turn it with all the might upon the precipitate 
shrieks. 
\ Such is the depravity of the will that it is delighted to 



THE ART OF BEIKG NATURAL. 69 

be turned upon the member for its injury, but sullenly [ 
refuses to budge when it is desired to effect a cure of the ' 
disordered part. It leaps with alacrity to give a preacher * 
the laryngitis, or the hypogrundia, and will not stir 
when implored to prevent him from being so much " in 
earnest" as to be inarticulate, and so " natural " as to 
fail in every excellence which goes to constitute an effec- 
tive speaker. 

Inflection is to be left to the elocution- E mo hasis to 
ary instinct, to the ear for inflection. It be Left to the 
is not to be learned from such a rule as Training of the 
this, for example, which I find in one of Elocutionary 
the books of elocution. 

Rule 1. — Whenever the sense of a sentence, or clause 
of a sentence, is as yet incomplete or suspended, then 
the rising inflection is to be used, as in the following : 

u I am sure, were the noble lords as well acquainted 
as /am with but half the difficulty and delays occasioned 
in the courts of justice under the pretence of privilege, 
they would not — nay, could not — oppose this bill." 

I am sure, were the noble lord as well acquainted as I 
am with but half the difficulty and delay occasioned by 
trying to speak his speech according to such a rule as 
this, he would thank me for delivering him from it and 
inducing him to try his own ear upon his own inflec- 
tions. 

Another of the rules of the elocutionist is : " Pause 
before and after the emphatic word, and put a circum- 
flex on it." 

Where did you get this rule ? 

From conversation. 

Finding that we do this naturally, let us do it mechan- 
ically. We do it by instinct in private talking, let us do 
it by rule in public speaking. Finding that while eating 



<70 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

every time jour elbow bends your month flies open, 
therefore this rnle : When your elbow bends, open yonr 
mouth ! Nonsense ! Leave the pauses, emphasis, and 
circumflex where you found them, and cultivate the ear 
for pauses, emphasis, and circumflex. If you deprive 
the speaker of his pauses and emphases and inflections, 
what is there left for his brains ? 

Walker is the father or grandfather of this attempt to 
reduce the art of public speaking to an elocutionary 
science, and failed, as he confessed in one of his prefaces. 

He and all his disciples proceed upon the assumption 
that in order to acquire the proper emphasis for your 
speech or sermon, you have only to commit to memory 
the emphases which they dictate for certain passages 
which they select from Shakespeare or Milton. 

Even if their emphasis were necessarily the correct 
one for the passage which they select, it is not of the 
slightest use in the attempt to find the emphasis of your 
speech on the tariff, or your sermon on Self-Deception. 
Suppose the preacher does repeat the Lord's Prayer with 
the emphasis and pauses and devout grimaces of his 
teacher, what then ? Does it follow that the teacher 
was right ? And if he was wrong his pupil will repeat 
his blunders in so set and stereotyped a way as to pre- 
clude all possibility of his reform. 

The books on elocution, the " Speakers" and 
" Readers" will even give you the " time," as though 
they were teaching instrumental music. To subject the 
actor to such a harness is bad enough, but to put it upon 
the public speaker is worse — it is fatal. " Time" in 
music is fixed, though even then it is sometimes defied 
by genius ; but in public speaking it is indispensable 
that it be unfixed and left to the elocutionary instinct, 
the will, the mood, the judgment, the tact, the ear for 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 71 

emphasis, inflection, and modulation. " Come, thou 
fount of every blessing" may have very different time in 
the music than it has in the supplicatory elocution of the 
speaker, or, for that matter, the reciter. The emphasis 
of the Lord's Prayer depends upon which idea or feeling 
of it is emphatic in the one who repeats it. The best 
preachers sometimes get their " heads" out of the words 
of their text, emphasizing each in its turn, as : Our, and 
Father, and heaven, etc. 

The elocutionist picks up these " renderings" of the 
stage and peddles them out to the preachers, who in turn 
manage to pick them up by mimicry and memory ; so 
that they may be able finally to render " To be or not to 
be" as emphatically as their teacher ; but to be or not to 
be benefited, that is the question. Whether it is nobler 
to endure this nonsense longer, or take up arms against 
it and reform it altogether, for, whatever help it may be 
to the player or reciter, it is not only not helpful, it is 
positively mischievous to the speaker. 

A few speakers have the elocutionary instinct in a 
high state of development to begin with, a few more 
have it in so sensitive and teachable a condition that it is 
soon brought to a high state of development ; but the 
great majority have it in so low and torpid a state to 
begin with, and the will is also so low and torpid, that 
the instinct gets but little beyond its original state and 
condition. 

Inflection and emphasis — in fact, everything that con- 
cerns public speaking, is to be left, not to " nature," by 
which is meant nobody and nothing, but to the training 

of the judgment, instinct, reason, tact. 

o ' M1 ,-t t ,. . , - Gesticulation 

home w T ill even £0 to the elocutionist for . « , 

fe by Rule. 

their gestures, or the rules by which their 

gestures are to be created and regulated. Imagine the 



72 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

speaker, imagine Whitefield, Bossuet, Fox, Clay, or 
Gladstone making his gestures with this rule in his mind 
and — hands ! 

" When the hand has once been brought into action 
in gesture, instead of dropping to the side, and then 
being brought up again for a similar purpose, it should 
generally remain in its position till relieved by the other 
hand, or till it passes into a state of preparation for a 
succeeding gesture." 

Would you do nothing about gestures ? I would 
leave them to the eye of the speaker, urging him to see 
to the training of his eye for the movements of his legs 
and arms. Besides, pruning is perilous. Awkwardness 
and strength are often inseparable in man, as well as 
the ox. 

Some of the most effective speakers are personally 
awkward. Their " natural manner" would be grotesque 
but for the oratory that comes with it, and is, indeed, 
inseparable from it. Prune them, and you destroy 
them. Their awkwardness would pass from their gestic- 
ulation to their thought or language, or both. Few of 
the Scotch preachers are graceful, and few but what 
have force and galvanic power. Alexander Duff held 
up the left half of his coat-tail under his left arm, and 
even sometimes bit his finger-ends in the midst of his 
most impressive oratorical flights. Arnot, Candlish, 
Macleod, Cairns — none of them were up in the awful 
rules for the "palm gesture," the dancing attitudes, or 
the "rising inflection." Would you spoil a dancing- \ 

/ master to make a preacher, or a preacher to make a 
dancing-master ? 

The learning of gesticulation, attitudes, and the like 

. under the tuition of a professional elocutionist cannot 
but belittle the great art of public speaking in the esti- 



THE ART OF BEINU NATURAL. 73 

mation of the speaker. The very thought of it is en- 
feebling, and makes him, or ought to make him, feel 
ashamed of himself. It ought to make him feel as silly 
as he looks. 

Did you ever know a professional elocutionist or 
teacher of emphasis and gesture, or, in a word, the 
teacher of the imitative system of elocution, to be a 
public speaker ? Some of them are excellent public 
readers, few have ever excelled as actors ; nevertheless, 
they are really of great service to those who wish to 
play, recite, or read, because these arts are so largely 
concerned with a merely mechanical u rendering" of 
certain pieces of dramatic composition which may be 
learned by rote. A fair memory, a fair voice, a fair 
instinct for mimicry, and, if the person be a lady, a fair 
show in the flesh, not to speak of the artifices of cos- 
tume, and you have the public reader with testimonials 
even overtopping those that burden the circular of the 
rising " Cicero of America." "Wonder if Cicero called 
himself the Snicklefritz of Rome ? 

The art of being natural in rhetoric is the result of 
genius with a few, with a Goldsmith, per- 
haps ; but it is the fruit of much cultiva- ^ Natural 
tion in the most of us, whether writers or Acquired 
speakers. When Jacobi was congratulated 
upon the ease with which he wrote, he replied : " You 
have little idea of the labor I expend in attaining per- 
spicuity." He sometimes copied five times. Rousseau 
wrote " Emile" nine times over. Schiller was as pains- 
taking, and even Goldsmith spent three years on the 
" Deserted Village." Moore thought nothing of spend- 
ing one month on one song, and Burns mooned for hours 
before he put pen to paper. Disraeli's wonderful im- 
promptu invective deceived the multitude, but the initi- 



74 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

ated could easily detect Burke's form in Disraeli's sar- 
casms, as well as his cadences in Macaulay's descriptions. 
Johnson said Addison was the master to study for Par- 
liamentary style. The orator " should give his days 
and ■ nights to Addison." Edward Irving followed 
Barrow and Jeremy Taylor. Pitt was, perhaps, one of 
the most striking examples of study and painstaking in 
the acquisition of vocabulary and style. Bishop Burnet 
was scarcely less studious of expression. Cardinal New- 
man, one of the greatest masters of vocabulary and 
rhythm and cadence in rhetoric, has given an account of 
the mental discipline to which he subjected himself in 
order to create the natural style which has made him 
famous. 

u Because my style is easy and natural," said Kean, 
"they think I don't study, and talk about the sudden 
impulse of genius. There is no such thing. All is 
studied beforehand. The speeches which, to my certain 
knowledge, sounded most impromptu were the most 
carefully studied beforehand. Furthermore, what is 
popularly known as the impulse of genius is the result 
of long training in vocabulary, in improvisation, and in 
handling audiences." 

The late Thomas Buckle, we are told, studied style for 

" force and clearness," and as he certainly 

How Buckle attained these two qualities, it is useful to 

and Clearness ^ 10S8 w ^° do n °t g et their rhetoric by in- 
spiration to know by what method he made 
the attainment. While studying style practically for his 
own future use, he had been in the habit of taking a 
subject, whether argument or narrative, from some 
author — Burke, for instance — and to write himself, fol- 
lowing, of course, the same line of thought, and then 
comparing his passage with the original, analyzing the 



THE ART OF BEING NATURAL. 75 

different treatment, so as to make it evident to himself 
where and how he had failed to express the meaning 
with the same vigor, or terseness, or simplicity. Force 
and clearness were his principal aim. 

Force and clearness are very suitable qualifications for 
the public speaker, and he may copy Mr. Buckle's 
method of securing it with advantage. He will never 
attain Buckle's " vigor, terseness, or simplicity" without 
cultivating Buckle's rhetorical ear for vigor, terseness, 
and simplicity. 

The art of being natural in the rhetoric or delivery of 
public speaking is acquired, not by the rules of the 
books, but by an exercise of the will, the rhetorical 
judgment, and the rhetorical taste ; by knowing what 
you are about, by making the most of yourself, by a 
study of rhetoric, and the practice of it. 

Landseer says when a color does not suit him, he 
scrapes it off and tries another. So does the artist with 
his colors in rhetoric. 

Sometimes this method, this exercise of the will, is 
slow in bearing fruit. Success comes slowly, and despair 
may come instead of success, because the 
ambition is greater than the voice, or the Thl ^ Method 
oratorical temperament, or the sense of B ear j ng . Fruit 
rhetoric, or the ear for elocution, or, per- 
haps, if the wretched hero had only held out a little 
longer his ambition would have been gratified. 

Sir James Graham exclaimed after repeated failures : 
" I have tried it every way — extempore, committing to 
memory, speaking from notes— and I cannot do it. I 
don't know why it is, but I am afraid I shall never suc- 
ceed." But he did succeed. By sheer perseverance in 
the use of his will he overcame his lack of qualification 
for public speaking, and became a speaker of great 



76 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

repute in the House of Commons. Lacordaire, French- 
man though he was, was so deficient in the Frenchman's 
adaptation to the rostrum that he failed utterly in several 
attempts, and everybody said : " He is a man of talent, 
but he will never be a preacher." Two years after he 
was entrancing thousands in the Notre Dame Cathedral, 
and was compared with Massillon and Bossuet. It was 
a triumph, not of elocution lessons, or practice in gestic- 
ulation and emphasis, but of the will, and the judgment, 
and self-reliance. 



VI. 

THE DKAMATIC ELEMENT IN PUBLIC 
SPEAKING. 

It is a mischievous assumption of the elocutionists 
that the art of the actor and the art of the speaker are 
one and the same art, and are to be taught in the same 
way, and governed by the same fixed rules. Preachers 
will join in the odious comparison designed to exalt the 
seriousness and earnestness, not to say reverence and 
piety, of the dramatic profession at the expense of their 
own. Anecdotes are artfully contrived to set off the 
extraordinary fidelity of the actor and the reprehensible 
unfaithfulness of the preacher, and are served up with 
much gusto by the preacher ! One of them runs thus : 

Preacher to actor : " How is it that you 
who deal in fiction have more effect upon ; a * C10US 

Anprnntp 

an audience than we who deal in truth ?" Made to Order. 

Actor to preacher : " Because we speak 
fiction as if it were truth, and you speak truth as if it 
were fiction." 

Antithetical sparkle and transparent twaddle. The 
anecdote factory revels in antithesis. What endowments 
in the way of witticism and criticism we confer upon our 
man of straw ! When the young missionary had related 
his imaginary controversy with a pagan, showing how he 
would overwhelm the pagan, the aged bishop remarked : 
" You should choose a cleverer pagan, my son !" If a 
preacher really did ask this question of an actor he made 



78 BEFOEE AN" AUDIENCE. 

an ass of himself, as doth every preacher who goes hat 
in hand to an actor to beg an anecdote designed to ele- 
vate the actor's art at the expense of his own. I will ask 
you a stupid question, O tragedian ! and you shall give 
me a stingingly antithetical reply, and I will demean 
myself by circulating your reply for the mortification of 
the clergy. So does the preacher deliberately join hands 
with the gesticulationists and tragedians in sneering at 
his own sincerity and covering his own motives with con- 
tempt. 

Even the antithesis is at fault. Fiction and fact are 
more accurately antithetical than fiction and truth, since 
a fiction may be to all intents and purposes the truth. 
The parables of the New Testament, for example, are 
both fictitious and truthful. They are not a narrative 
of facts, but are faithful to life, nevertheless, as all 
fictitious creations designed to teach morality or religion 
should be. 

To say that the actor speaks fiction as if it were truth, 
is to say that he tells a lie so successfully that the audi- 
ence receive it as the truth, which is preposterous. And 
to say that the preacher speaks truth as if it were fiction 
must mean, if it means anything, that he tells the truth 
in such a way as to compel the audience to regard it 
as falsehood, which is also preposterous. There are 
preachers, perhaps, who dispense one set of doctrines 
from the pulpit, and quite another set of doctrines from 
their study-chair. But these preachers are not alluded 
to in this anecdote. Then as to the " effect upon the 
audience" — would you compare the effect produced by, 
say, the most effective preaching, with the effect pro- 
duced by the most effective acting ? What similarity is 
there between your state of mind in looking upon the 
representation of '•' Hamlet" or the " American Cousin," 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN PUBLIC SPEAKING. 79 

and your state of mind while listening to a sermon on 

the parable of the Prodigal Son ? 

Another preacher asks an actor (Garrick he is called in 

this anecdote) how a sermon ought to be 

delivered, and the actor replies: "You An Actor Tells 

know how you .would feel and speak in a TT a Pre ^ cher 
_ J . ,, . J , . How a Sermon 

drawing-room concerning a iriena who - s to be 

was in imminent danger of his life, and Delivered, 
with what energetic pathos of diction and 
countenance you would enforce the observance of what 
you really thought would be for his preservation. You 
would be yourself, and the interesting nature of the sub- 
ject impressing your heart would furnish you with the 
most natural tone of voice, the most proper language, 
the most engaging features, and the most suitable and 
graceful gestures. What you would be in the drawing- 
room be in the pulpit, and you will not fail to please, to 
affect, and to pro£t." 

Now, do you know exactly how you would feel and 
speak in a drawing-room concerning a friend who was in 
imminent danger of his life ? Dickens's description of 
what was felt and said and done at the inn, where and 
when little Nell was in imminent danger of her life, is 
no caricature. The fact is, that under the circumstances 
imagined you are about as likely to do the wrong thing 
as the right thing, or you might do the right thing in 
the wrong way, and in the midst of your " energetic 
pathos" tumble over the piano-stool, and break your own 
neck, if not that of your friend as well. It is perfectly 
natural for some people to lose their heads just when 
their heads are most needed. The " interesting nature" 
of the fact that a friend had fallen headlong in a fit, 
might furnish you with the most natural tone of voice in 
the way of a shriek, and the most naturally absurd 



80 BEFORE AH" AUDIEKCE. 

behavior. You might very naturally, considering your 
absorbing interest in your friend's peril, hand your 
friend the inkstand instead of the hartshorn-vial to 
smell. When the babe swallowed the marble, the father 
swooned away, but the mother up-ended the infant, 
squeezed the marble out of him, and then restored her 
" natural protector" by the " most suitable and graceful 
gestures," such as pulling his nose and boxing his ears. 
It is so difficult to tell exactly what we would do if a 
friend should tumble down at the party, that it does not 
help us much to be instructed to do the same when we 
discourse from the pulpit. Many a person who thought 
he would know exactly what to do if he should see 
another person drowning was, when the exigency came, 
as successfully useless as any of the rest of the spectators, 
who excelled in nothing but the " energetic pathos of 
diction and countenance. 55 I speak from experience. 
I saw about five hundred people spin round on their 
axis once while a man was in imminent danger of his 
life from drowning, and I span round with the same 
" natural tone of voice 55 and the same " energetic pathos 
of diction and countenance. 55 

1 venture to say that if Garrick's instructions had 
been followed by his preacher, Garrick would have been 
the first to leave the house in disgust. He would ask : 
" What is the matter with the parson? Is he mad?' 5 
And I would reply : " No, those are the engaging feat- 
ures and graceful gestures and natural tones of voice 
which he used in the drawing-room while fetching the 
hartshorn for a friend who had fainted from a lack of 
ventilation, and was consequently in imminent danger of 
his life. 55 To see the absurdity of this advice to the 
preachers we have only to ask : Should a preacher 
behave in the pulpit as though he were rescuing a man 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN PUBLIC SPEAKING. 81 

from drowning, or nursing him out of a fainting fit ? 
If ever the occasion for such behavior should arise, it 
would be an occasion similar to that which is perpetual 
on the boards of a theatre. What is occasional with the 
speaker is perpetual with the actor. 

I suspect that something of the nature of theatrical 
earnestness is running in the heads of these anecdotes, 
and the suspicion is confirmed by the next anecdote by 
which I will illustrate our topic. 

The bishop to the actor, who in this instance is Better- 
ton : " What is the reason that whole audiences should 
be moved to tears, and have all sorts of 

passions excited, at the representation of _ ea f lca 
r 7 i . 1 -i i Earnestness, 

some story on the stage, w T hicn they knew 

to be feigned, and in the event of which they were not 
at all concerned ; yet that the same persons should sit 
so utterly unmoved at discourses from the pulpit, upon 
subjects of the utmost importance to them, relative not 
only to their temporal, but also their eternal interests ? 55 
The actor to the bishop : " My lord, it is because we 
are in earnest. 55 What are we to think of the self- 
respect of a bishop who makes so humiliating a confes- 
sion to an actor, and gives the actor so excellent an 
opportunity to make that humiliation worse ? My lord, 
it is because we actors are in earnest and you preachers 
are fooling ! Was the bishop warranted in judging all 
"discourses from the pulpit 55 by his own? Would 
Whitefield or Lacordaire be likely to put such a question 
to Betterton ? Was not Garrick far more likely to put 
the question reversed to Whitefield ? Besides, was the 
bishop 5 s " unmoved 55 audience " the same persons 55 
who were " moved to tears 55 by Betterton 5 s " earnest- 
ness 55 ? Again, does it never occur to this bishop or any 
other of these reverend fathers and brethren who revel 



82 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

in these anecdotes, to tlieir own disgrace, that, according 
to their own confession and profession, they are not in 
the business, and that the actors are in the business of 
" exciting all sorts of passions by the representation of 
some story which they know to be feigned, and in the 
event of which they are not at all concerned " ? Does it\ 
never occur to them that it is very much easier to make I 
a man cry over a feigned story, or even a real one, than 1 
it is to make him abandon the very sins over which he is 
boo-hooing in the story ? Betterton might have moved 

. David to tears with the feigned story of the ewe lamb 
without compelling him to do what the prophet's preach- 
ing did — restore the lamb and quit wife-stealing. Better 

-pNathan's method without tears than Betterton 's with. 
The actor does not profess to save men from sin, or 
women from men. 

" Because we are in earnest." What are you in ear- 
nest about ? The representation of " feigned stories' ' to 
"excite all sorts of passions," and move the nervous 
system to tears. This is theatrical earnestness, and is, 
as I have already insisted, an example to the preacher in 
so far as it means physical earnestness and self-reliance, 
in so far as it is compelling yourself to come to time, 
and compelling yourself to make the most of yourself 
when you stand before an audience. But to suppose 
that the preacher must necessarily be theatrical or 
dramatic in manner or delivery in order to insure the 
success of his " discourses from the pulpit upon subjects 
of the highest importance," is another of the flagrant 
errors that come of confounding the art of the actor with 
the art of the speaker. Some of the most effective 
speaking has been done by speakers who stuck to the 
colloquial element in both the manner and the matter of 
their discourses, whether scientific lectures, regulation 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IK PUBLIC SPEAKING. 83 

sermons, or reformatory speeches. They were and are 
in earnest, physically, mentally, and morally, but not 
theatrically or histrionically in earnest. President 
Finney, one of the best reasoners the pulpit of this 
country has ever known, spoke uniformly in a conver- 
sational style, but he was in earnest, oppressively so 
sometimes. Never was there a more self-reliant speaker, 
or one that had a more complete control of himself, or 
who knew better w T hat he and his audience were about. 
His elocution was in keeping with his argumentative 
style. The dramatic element would have been ridicu- y 
lously out of keeping with it. 

Demosthenes is quoted to justify this A Letter 
confounding of the art of the actor and from Carl y le 
the art of the speaker. The quotation is D emos thenes 
as illustrious as it is fallacious. He gave Said, 

as the three requisites for oratory, action 
— action — action. I asked Thomas Carlyle what he 
thought of this, and he gave me the following reply, 
which is now published for the first time : 

" According to Demosthenes, as all the world knows, 
the thrice first requisite for eloquence is action. Not till 
lately did I ever ask myself what strictly did he mean by 
action ? Is it swinging of the arms, attitude, gesticu- 
lation, and the like ? What especially is the Greek word 
he uses ? After search I at last discovered that it was 
upockrisis, play-acting, hypocrisy, persuading everybody 
that you are speaking from the heart. In which opinion 
I thoroughly agreed with Demosthenes, so far as Demos- 
thenes went. But at once there rose within me this 
second much more important question : Why in the 
name of all the gods, when a wretched creature is speak- 
ing, not from the heart, but only, with great art or little, 
pretending to do it, why do not other human creatures 



84 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

rise upon him with horror and terror, and the peremp- 
tory order, scandalous, mendacious phantasm, pretend- 
ing to be human and real, cease ! Under pain of whip- 
ping, and at length hanging, no more of that. To me 
privately the stump orator is a quite alarming phenom- 
enon, though, alas ! I know him to be for long times yet 
an inevitable one. May he become extinct one day, as 
the Dodo has done." The stump orator has just run 
his course in Great Britain again, and the more of bun- 
comb and striving after wind he perpetrated, the more 
nearly he followed the stump oratory of the author of 
" Fighting Niagara." But 1 never think of thee with- 
out admiration and a big thrill, glorious old stump 
orator, " stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to thy 
rest." 

There can be no doubt of the meaning of Demos- 
thenes, although the elocution books have substituted 
the Latin translation for it, and call it action. Demos- 
thenes said and meant acting— acting — acting. He 
meant precisely what we would mean if we should say : 
The three requisites for public speaking are : Be 
dramatic — be dramatic — be dramatic. Or as though 
we should say : Be histrionic ; or, behave in the pulpit, 
and on the rostrum, exactly as the, actors behave on the 
stage. 

Demosthenes' advice is as easy of explanation as its 
fallacy is of refutation. The orators of his day looked 
to the stage for their examples. With them, the object 
of public speaking was very similar to that of public act- 
ing — a means for making a temporary impression, or for 
rousing to immediate and precipitate action. Not to 
dwell upon this point, which could be made exceedingly 
interesting and instructive, suffice it to say here that the 
public speaking to which Demosthenes refers in this 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IK PUBLIC SPEAKING. 85 

triple requisite is what we call dramatic oratory proper, 
or the oratorical element so expanded as to exclude all 
other elements. c 

This may be very properly done by some speakers — 
Gough, for instance — and on some occasions, but that it 
comprises the whole of public speaking as we under- 
stand and practise that art is obviously inadmissible. 
Nine tenths of our speaking is necessarily colloquial, as I 
have before remarked. It is didactic, it is teaching, it 
is conveying information. Even where it is controver- 
sial, as in a deliberative body, it may be more effective 
to be colloquial than dramatic or oratorical. Even in 
Demosthenes' day teaching was done by lecturing, and 
lecturing was done on a conversational key. He would 
probably not call that the art of ruling the minds of 
men by rhetoric, or public speaking. But we do. 
"What he had in mind was dramatic oratory, the dramatic 
element in public speaking, the art of the actor utilized 
as an element in the art of the speaker. They are 
kindred arts, but not the same art. No one person ever 
excelled in both. The history of public speaking is full 
of illustrations of how much the art of the speaker is 
indebted to the art of the actor. Nevertheless, they are 
very far apart in their method and object. 

During the Middle Ages the people were Historical 
dependent exclusively upon the drama for Examples of 
their knowledge of the history of the Element 
Christian religion. " Cloister and church 
were the first theatres, priests the first actors ; the first 
dramatic matter was the Passion, and the first drama the 
mysteries of the church." 

The natural manner of Bossuet and Bourdaloue was 
impressive in the highest degree, while that of Massillon 
was quiet and uniform, but his pathos was dramatic. 



86 BEFOKE AH AUDIENCE. 

On the margin of a sermon delivered at Bruges in 1500, 
the preacher reminds himself that here he is to " shriek 
like the devil," and of Father Honore, a long while 
after, it was said : " He distracts the ear, but he rends 
the heart. ' ' 

Savonarola literally fulfilled the popular requirement 
and was " carried away by his subject," for he ran out 
of the pulpit, but only to produce a paroxysm of relig- 
ious fanaticism, which was succeeded by a return of 
the old levity and vice. The fact that Dante's works 
were in the pile of immoral literature that was burned 
before him proves how utterly untrustworthy are the 
effects produced by earnestness in the popular sense of 
that word. The gamblers at Nuremberg burning their 
dice in the streets under the spell of dramatic earnestness 
exercised by the Franciscan missionaries is another 
example. Others might be noted as the result of the 
preaching of Bernardine and of Friar Richard of Paris. 

It is worthy of note that " the golden age ,? of the 
French pulpit was what is popularly understood as an 
age of earnestness in the pulpit. It was dramatic ear- 
nestness, physical earnestness, and had no more perma- 
nent effect upon the vices of society than the undemon- 
strative sermons of the preceding age. Kings and their 
mistresses listened with equal unconcern to the theat- 
rical anathemas of the pulpit. Louis said they " made 
him feel uncomfortable, but not long." Indeed, the 
toleration of the clergy was owing to their ineffective- 
ness, whether they spoke with Massillon's persuasive elo- 
quence or Bossuet's impressive gestures. 

Edward Irving's almost violence of manner and elocu- 
tion was saved from intolerable rant by the skill with 
which he used the dramatic element with which he was 
largely endowed by nature, and which he cultivated as- 



_ 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IK PUBLIC SPEAKING. 87 

siduously. His influence was evanescent from the un- 
sanity of his teachings. They rejoiced for a time in the 
light of a meteor. 

Erskine carried the dramatic element to as high a pitch 
at the bar as Irving did in the pulpit. Lord Abinger 
says of him : 

" To his parts as an orator he added those of a con- 
summate actor. His eye, his countenance, the action of 
his limbs and body, were full of expression, elegance, 
and dignity. ... I am satisfied that if one who had not 
understood the language had merely seen his action and 
heard the various tones and modulation of his voice, he 
could not but have experienced considerable pleasure and 
excitement from the exhibition." 

I can never forget the imposing manner and dramatic 
action of Bishop Mermillod of Geneva, or Strossmayer 
of Hungary, or Gatry of the Madeleine at Paris. I 
heard the great southern preachers of the (Ecumenical 
Council, or, rather, so vast was the audience, and so 
foreign was the language of the preachers, and so bad 
were the acoustic properties of Michael Angelo's archi- 
tecture, that I could only see the great preachers ; but 
they were so dramatic and pantomimic that one could 
not fail to be impressed. 

Whitefield came nearer to the Demosthenic standard 
than is possible with many speakers of our 
Western race. He utilized the histrionic Wni tefield's 
art in public speaking beyond any other Dramatic 
preacher of his age and tongue. The Element, 
actors heard him with envy. Garrick was 
jealous of the skill and grace with which he handled his 
handkerchief. His manners, it is said, captivated the 
fastidious Chesterfield, he extorted admiration from the 
philosophical Bolingbroke, and the elegant sceptic, 



88 BEFOKE AH AUDIENCE. 

David Hume, went great distances to hear doctrines that 
he detested delivered in a style that fascinated him. 

Whitefield's studious and painstaking devotion to the 
three great requisites was evident in his preference for 
revised- over new sermons. They were improved in 
delivery by delivery, and he knew well how to improve 
them. Benjamin Franklin said his delivery was so 
improved by frequent repetition, and every emphasis 
and modulation became so perfectly timed, that without 
being interested in the subject one could not help being 
pleased with the discourse — a pleasure of much the same 
kind as that received from an excellent piece of music. 
Garrick and Foote agreed that Whitefield's oratory 
" was not at its full height until he had repeated a dis- 
course forty times." 

"When Whitefield acted an old blind man advancing 
by slow steps toward the edge of the precipice, Lord 
Chesterfield started up and cried : " Good God, he is 
gone !" And when the seamen heard and saw his de- 
scription of the ship on her beam-ends, they sprang to 
their feet and shouted : " The long-boat — take to the 
long-boat !" This scene is worth reproducing. 

Suddenly assuming a nautical air and manner that 
were irresistible, he thus suddenly broke in with : 
" Well, my boys, we have a clear sky, and are making 
fine headway over a smooth sea before a light breeze, 
and we shall soon lose sight of land. But what means 
this sudden lowering of the heavens, and that dark cloud 
arising from beneath the western horizon ? Hark ! 
Don't you hear distant thunder ? Don't you see those 
flashes of lightning ? There is a storm gathering ! 
Every man to his duty ! How the waves rise and dash 
against the ship ! The air is dark ! — the tempest rages ! 
— our masts are gone ! — the ship is on her beam -ends ! 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN PUBLIC SPEAKING. 89 

What next ?" This appeal instantly brought the sailors 
to their feet, with a shout : " The long-boat ! — take to 
the long-boat !" 

And yet here comes a leading London newspaper ask- 
ing : " Wherein lies the secret of Whitefield's power \ 
What was the spell by which he not only enthralled the 
multitude, but also men of clear judgments and capacious 
intellects and cold hearts ? When we read Whitefield's 
sermons we find nothing in them that explains this 
mystery. He was not a theologian ; he was not a 
thinker ; he had no high poetical imagination ; his dic- 
tion is commonplace ; his imagery conventional ; his 
range of illustration limited ; and it is remarkable that 
he has left nothing in literature, not even in devotional 
literature, by which he deserves to be remembered — not 
a single treatise, not a hymn, not a page of a discourse. 
Face to face with men he did with them almost what he 
chose, but he had no skill to sway them by written 
words." 

Here is a reasonably intelligent fellow-creature who, 
mayhap, makes his living out of the English language, 
and yet does not know enough about it to know that- 
public speaking is one method of using it, and the most 
effective one. He recognizes acting, and writing, and 
thinking as accredited departments of human endeavor, 
but the department and art of ruling the minds of men 
by an animal galvanic battery on two legs — that is a 
secret to him ! 

Still, Whitefield was far from being an actor in the 
full and strict sense, and would certainly have failed in 
that profession, notwithstanding what Stephen says, that 
"lie cultivated the histrionic art to a perfection which 
has rarely been obtained even by the most eminent of 
those who have trodden the stage in sock and buskin." 



00 BEFORE AN ACJDIENCE. 

But he would have found the sock and buskin very 
different harness from the pulpit gown. The rules of 
the actor are as minute as the deviation from them is 
serious. Cicero notes how much easier the critics were 
with the orators than they were with the actors, and 
Lucian called a blundering gesture on the stage a 
grave offence. A blundering gesture on the platform is 
sometimes inseparable from the most effective speaking. 

No, with all his use of the histrionic element White- 
field was exclusively a public speaker, and is worthy of 
study with special reference to that point. He was self- 
reliant for his mesmeric and dramatic power just as the 
actor is, however. He made use of his will, he made 
the most of himself as an animal galvanic battery on two 
legs. 

It is a common opinion that the dramatic element is 
more popular with an Oriental or Southern race than 
it is with oars. I doubt it. Running after Whitefield 
and his school, even after some very poor specimens of 
the school, disproves it. It is more a matter of fashion 
than of race or clime. Civilization casts off in one age 
what it takes on in another, whether it is inebriety in 
society or the dramatic element in oratory. Another 
Father Honore may put on a magistrate's cap and hold 
up the skull of a magistrate in the pulpit any Sunday, 
and exclaim with as much appropriateness as he of old : 
" Hast thou never sold justice?" Fashions, like tem- 
perature and diseases, go in waves. Public taste has its 
ebbs and flows. Witness the ebb and flow of the gown. 

The restoration of the gown by the descendants of the 

Puritans, and the partiality of the young 

A Quakers for the vestments of the " ancient 

an Accessory. ^ 

order," are signs of life in the dramatic 
element. The gown, whether on the bench or at the bar, 



THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IX PUBLIC SPEAKING. 91 

whether in the pulpit or in the university lecture-room, 
is an auxiliary of so much importance that it is sure to 
survive the ignorance and fanaticism that lays it aside. 
Costume, as well as clouds, is controlled by law. To 
any that are influenced by the absurd idea that the gown 
means any form of religion I recommend a perusal of 
Dean Stanley's " Christian Institutions." 

The gown's justification is in its usefulness. Besides 
being a useful insignia for the teacher and preacher, 
lawyer and judge, it is a physical accessory of positive 
importance. It conceals the defects of the physique. 
It fills out a thin man, thins out a fat one, lowers a tall 
man, heightens a short one, conceals awkwardness, 
promotes gracefulness in gesture and attitude, and withal 
has a friendly, warm, and genial look. Mark the in- 
congruity between the drapery of the ladies at a fashion- 
able wedding in an architectural church, and the impov- 
erished and emaciated black outline of a hitching-post of 
an officiating minister. And to make the contrast com- 
plete and completely absurd, he wears a swallow-tail coat ! 

Now, this dramatic element in public speaking seems 
to be the only element which the elocu- 
tionists recognize, whereas it is neither The Colloc l uial 
,-,-.,. t Element 

the only nor the most important element, wears Best 

The colloquial is more important, more 

in use, more to be depended upon in the long run. 

The dramatic element, however, is indispensable to 
some, useful to all. It may come of genius, but it may 
be cultivated — and should be. It can be culti seated by 
the cultivation of the elocutionary instinct, the rhetorical 
instinct, the dramatic instinct, by the training of the ear 
for rhetoric and the eye for rhetorical and dramatic 
effects. Imitation helps, and observation plays its part, 
but if the art of the actors and the art of the speakers 



92 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

are confounded, and yon undertake to acquire one by 
acquiring the other, you will acquire neither. The actor 
"renders" the Lord's Prayer, the preacher prays it. 
The former may use the emphasis of his teacher, the 
latter must use his own. Garrick and Whitefield would 
both fail if they changed places. 

There is one objection to this professional elocutionary 
style, whether in reading or speaking, which is little 
spoken of or thought of, and that is this : it is wearying. 
A little of it now and then is pleasing, but it does not 
require much of it to pall upon the taste, like candy and 
ice-cream. It may do as occasional confectionery, but 
does not answer for a perpetual diet. Public speaking 
is perpetual diet. The play-goers will tolerate only so 
much of the " legitimate drama," and the church-goers 
would stay at home even more than they do if the 
preachers should all and always be dramatic and em- 
phatic and theatric. Where they are blunderers at it 
they amuse, where they are excellent at it they weary. 
Even Whitefield and Erskine, with all their skill, would 
weary out the audience if it were always the same audi- 
ence. 

It is the colloquial element that wears best, whether 
on the platform, in the pulpit, at the bar, or on the floor 
of a deliberative body. 

To repeat, so as to prevent misconception or confu- 
sion : First, the self -excitation or physical earnestness of 
the actor is just as desirable and valuable to the speaker 
as it is to the actor ; second, the dramatic manner, which 
is inseparable from the drama, is a very useful auxiliary 
to public speaking ; but, third, when and by whom this 
dramatic manner is to be used is to be left to the judg- 
ment of the speaker ; and, fourth, that judgment may 
be trained to an indefinite extent. 



VII. 
THE EHETOEIC FOE PUBLIC SPEAKING. 

Ehetoric was at first composed and arranged for 
public speaking. That, indeed, is what the word means, 
and even so recent an authority as Webster gives as one 
of its definitions "the science of oratory." Plato, to 
quote him again, calls it " the art of ruling the minds of 
men. " The modern speaker was the ancient rhetorician. 
The essay is a recent form of composition. The rhetoric 
for public speaking comprises all the forms into which 
language can be thrown — narrative, didactic, poetical, 
dramatic. 

The rhetoric of the higher forms of oratory has a 
rhythm and cadence of its own. It is 
an oratorical undulation that comes in well The Rhetoric 
with tlie oratorical temperament. The Public 

best speeches are only speeches, as the best a cadence 
essays are only essays. An essay may be of its own. 
declaimed, but public speaking could not 
long endure exclusively in the form of the essay or the 
narrative. 

Sheridan was offered a thousand pounds for a corrected 
copy of his great Begum speech, but had the wisdom to 
refuse, although Byron pronounced it the best oration 
ever delivered in England, and it received similar en- 
comiums from Wilberforce, Fox, Burke, and Pitt. How 
many practised speakers would have been as wise ! How 
many would know, and act upon the knowledge, that 



94 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

the very extravagance of the approval was evidence that 
the speech was only a speech, and that its effects which 
drew the admiration came and went with the speech ! 
"When the " public request" comes for the sermon to be 
printed, tell it to call again in six months and you will 
be ready for it, and you will never be troubled with it 
again. When the exhilaration produced by the sermon 
passes off the request for it at ten cents a copy subsides. 
Few sermons endure the types. Whitefield's are unen- 
durable. 

On the other hand, oratorical rhetoric of the highest 
order is imperishable, even in the case of such an orator 
as Burke, where the author of it failed in the delivery 
of it. The u dinner-bell " will always call to a glorious 
repast of what has been well called " Poetry and Phi- 
losophy in Oratoric Form." Macaulay gave us history, 
biography, and criticism in oratoric form, although he, 
too, failed in speaking the speech that came to him in 
oratoric form. Bolingbroke's orations, however, were 
both well composed and well delivered. They were 
prolonged flights of imaginative and impassioned diction, 
and their elocution was in keeping with it. 

Gladstone's diction, too, is oratorical, which, as Ma- 
caulay says, " set off by the graces of utterance and ges- 
ture, vibrate on the ear." He is the public speaker in 
person, as well as in rhetoric. Fox's fist was in his dic- 
tion as well as his gesture, and rightly so. He said 
"it was necessary to hammer it into them." And it 
was, for him. With his fist and his repetitions he was 
far more effective than he could have been in the harness 
of Bolingbroke or Chesterfield. He failed in elaborate 
and painstaking preparation. Fronde's style and tem- 
perament are oratorical, and his rhetoric owes its fasci- 
nation to that fact, Lecky to the contrary notwithstand- 






THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 95 

ing, who condemns it because it " quivers with passion" 
and is " as fierce as that of the most fiery debater in Par- 
liament." But there is no objection to it, seeing that it 
is the rhetoric of the most fiery debater out of Parlia- 
ment, which he has a perfect right to be. Let the 
prophet speak as he is inspired to speak, and give us the 
words as they are given to him. 

When Canning passed away a magazine writer ex- 
claimed : u There died the last of the rhetoricians !" 
Bat since his death there have arisen a galaxy of rhetori- 
cians that have done more to make the English language 
effective with a popular assembly and the great mass of 
all people than any of their predecessors, Science never 
had such a hearing, never, in fact, had any hearing 
worth speaking of in " oratoric form" before it found 
utterance in the rhetoric of Darwin, Tyndale, and 
Huxley. The diction of public speaking is the vehicle 
by which religion, philosophy, politics, and science reach 
mankind. Go ye into all the world and teach it, or 
rouse it, is a command impossible of obedience without 
the one supreme art of all arts — " the art of ruling the 
minds of men" by public speaking. It is the highest of 
the arts, and it will be the last to perish from the earth. 

John Bright betrays a fastidiousness of rhetorical taste 
by not only the rarity of his addressee, but by the in- 
ternal evidence of painstaking in their preparation. 
Daniel Webster showed the same consciousness and 
oratorical pains. It is curious to compare the report of 
his speech in reply to Hayne as it is declaimed in college 
and the original report, which has recently been made 
public. The euphonious peroration so familiar to us all 
can be seen here in the rough as it was delivered in the 
Senate. 

' When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on 



93 BEFORE AE" AUDIETSTCE. 

the meridian sun, I hope 1 may see him shining bright 
upon my united, free, and happy country. I hope I 
shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed 
fragments of the structure of this once-glorious Union. 
I hope I may not see the flag of my country with its 
stars separated or obliterated ; torn by commotions ; 
smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not 
see the standard raised of separate States' rights, star 
against star and stripe against stripe ; but that the flag 
of the Union may keep its stars and stripes corded and 
bound together in indissoluble ties. 1 hope I shall not 
see written as its motto, first liberty and then Union. I 
hope I shall see no such delusive and deluded motto on 
the flag of that country. I hope to see spread all over it, 
blazoned in letters of light and proudly floating over land 
and sea that other sentiment, dear to my heart, ' Union 
and liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable. ' 

A speech or sermon or plea is like a large picture 
painted to be seen at a distance ; it will not bear and is 
not expected to endure microscopic criticism. It is to 
be heard in the mass and from afar. What would be 
considered blemishes upon close inspection are indispen- 
sable qualities when heard, as they are designed to be 
heard, at the right distance. 

Ehetoric is not a science to be learned by committing 
to memory a lot of minute rules ; it is an art, and excel- 
lence in it is to be attained by the training 

Training of £ ^ r } ie t rical instinct — the rhetorical 
the Rhetorical . , ,, „ , , . ,, 

Instinct judgment, the sense ot rhetoric, the ear 

for rhythm and euphony and idiom. 

This is what needs stimulation and cultivation while the 

student is passing through his course of preparation for 

a public life which will depend for its success upon 

writing or public speaking. He is not to be handed a 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 97 

book and required to burden bis memory with several 
pages of its rules ; he should be handed a pen and re-1 
quired to create several paragraphs with the best rhetor- 
ical judgment he can bring into exercise, or he should 
be required to get on his legs and put into a speech the 
best language his ear for rhetorical propriety suggests. 

Teacher and pupil work together on the pupils' rhetor- 
ical instinct. " Practice makes perfect," but perfection, 
or even progress, will come very slowly if the practice 
does not take hold of this sense of rhetoric or faculty for 
rhetoric. From the very start the ear, or sense, or 
faculty should be kept in lively operation. Every essay, 
speech, or sermon should be held rigidly accountable to 
this court of final appeal, from whose decisions there is 
no appeal. The question should be not so much, Why 
is this right ? but, Is it right ? The pupil must see and 
feel that it is right, instead of acquiescing mechanically 
in the opinion of the teacher or the law of the book 
upon the subject. The art of rhetoric is something 
drawn out from within, not something laid on from with- 
out. A science asks the reason why a thing is right ; 
an art asks only : Is it right ? In mathematics you can 
tell wherein you are right and wherein you are wrong. 
In rhetoric (as in painting) you cannot always and need 
not ever know why you are wrong or right, or partly 
wrong and partly right. You could not get on in 
geometry if you should depend exclusively upon your 
mathematical instinct ; on the contrary, the reason why 
pupils in the English language do not get on faster and 
farther is because they do not depend upon their rhetori- ( 
cal instinct, but content themselves with committing to 
memory a tangled jungle of " rules and exceptions," and 
then adding to them a mass of rhetorical " principles" 
and sub-principles. 



98 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

When Haydn was criticised for modulations as con- 
trary to the principles of music, he replied : "I have 
put that passage there because it does well." Said the 
critic : "It is contrary to the rules." Haydn rejoined : 
"But it is the pleasantest. " Haydn's musical instinct 
was better than his critic's musical rules. It was an 
educated instinct and judgment, however. 

"The men who cannot paint," said William Hunt, 
" are ready with admirable reasons for everything they 
have done;" but when he was asked his reason ,foz* 
putting on a certain color, he replied : " I don't know ; 
I am just aiming at it." The artist in the colors of 
rhetoric does not paint according to rule, he aims. 

From the most rudimentary elements of grammar to the 
highest attainments in rhetoric the only 

We Learn rational and effective way to learn how to 
how to Use uge ] an p. ua g e i s to use it and use it, and 
L#cin2 r Uci8re dv •■*" ■n>M-- r r « f 

Using it. continue to use it with the best rhetorical 

judgment you have in your possession. 

As the child does not need to know why his sentence 
is ungrammatical, but simply needs to know and re- 
member that it is ungrammatical, so the most accom- 
plished rhetorician in the world needs nothing more to 
guide him than his educated sense of rhetorical propriety. 
The rules of rhetoric for the college student and the rule 
of grammar for the academy pupil are equally super- 
fluous and embarrassing. As, for example : 

Rule of grammar for the academy pupil: " If the 
subject of a sentence consists of two nouns or pronouns 
united by the conjunction ' and,' the verb must be put 
in the plural. As : John and James are in the field." 

In the first place, how many boys and girls on the 
primary benches of the common school would say : 
" John and James is in the field" ? In the second 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 99 

place, if one of them should say it, would it not be far 
more effective for the teacher or parent to " put the 
verb in the plural " for him then and there and thence- 
forth, than to require him to commit the rule to memory, 
leaving his practice of it to take care of itself ? which is 
uniformly and universally done. The teacher crams the 
pupil with rules, and joins the pupil in disobeying them. 
This is easily explained. It is an easy problem in 
mental philosophy. Your habitual absorption in minute 
and elaborate rules renders you indifferent to their appli- 
cation. It is very doubtful whether teaching a thing is 
calculated to make us any the more disposed to practise 
it. Indeed, I should prefer to maintain the converse of 
the preposition. Perpetually dwelling on how or why a 
thing should be done may not only distract the attention 
from the doing of it, but may even disqualify us for 
doing it. 

Rule of rhetoric for the college student : " The chief 
form of the synecdoche consists in naming a thing by 
some part of it, as : Fifty sail — they sought his blood." 

In the first place, the phraseology of this rule or prin- 
ciple, like that of many another of its kind, is too 
abstruse to be intelligible without an example. This 
suggests, in the second place, the query whether the 
example would not be more effective without the rule 
than with it. It certainly would. In the third place, 
then, if the example does not commend itself without 
the principle, it will not because of the principle. 
In other words, all the pupil needs is the example. All 
he needs to know is that there is such a form of expres- 
sion, and that he is free to appropriate or repudiate it as 
his rhetorical judgment shall dictate. Example acting 
upon the rhetorical instinct, the rhetorical instinct assimi- 
lating the example. The best book of examples for a 



-V 



100 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

student in rhetoric is a book written by a good rhetori- 
cian. There is no better training for the rhetorical ear 
than the perpetual companionship of first-rate writers — 
not only correct or elegant writers, but contagious ones. 
Even the best of writers may be divided into contagious 
and non-contagious. 

Is it likely that Mr. Froude or " George Eliot" would 

defend their use of the phrase, " they 

The Infant's sought his blood," on the ground that 

Way the cc ^ e ^^f f orm f the synecdoche con- 
Best Way of . . . + i • , . n 

Learning S1S * S in namm g a thing by some part of 

Rhetoric. it " ? Is it likely that they ever commit- 
ted to memory any such rule, or if they 
did, is it likely they are indebted to it or any such for 
their proficiency in the use of the rhetorical judgment ? 

Suppose your attention should be called to your saying 
" was" when you should say " were" (a common error). 
Would you look up your grammar and commit to 
memory this rule : " When in a conditional clause it is 
intended to express doubt or denial, use the subjunctive 
mood " ? Or, would you begin at once to substitute the 
right word for the wrong one ? 

It is only a degree more absurd to cram the infant at 
five years of age with the whys and wherefores of the 
corrections you urge upon his attention, than to bore the 
child at twelve years of age with the reason why the 
verb should be " put in the plural " or to burden the 
memory of the youth of nineteen years of age with awful 
# principles about synecdoche or autonomasia. 

The infant gradually corrects his syntax by following 
his rhetorical instinct under example and tuition. The 
child and the man should be kept to the same method. 
The ear for rhythm and idiom should be cultivated by 
practice under example, guidance, stimulation, and dis- 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 101 

cipline, whether the pupil be five, ten, or twenty years 
of age. 

The infant's use of language and sense of rhetorical 
propriety will be influenced by his examples and instruc- 
tions. He will go up to the accuracy and elegance, or 
he will stay down with the rudeness and vulgarity by 
which he is surrounded. Just as his rhetorical instinct 
is bent, his rhetorical culture will be inclined. His 
method of advancement will be precisely the same after 
he has left the companions of his infancy as it was 
before. His attainments will depend upon, not the 
number of rules and exceptions he has stored in his 
head, but upon the amount and kind of cultivation his 
rhetorical instinct has received 

Just as the infant learns his mother tongue up to the 
time he is considered of proper age to be coached with 
" rules and exceptions," just so should he continue to 
learn his native language to the end of his days, whether 
he confines himself to the use of that language in con- 
versation, or employs it in newspaper, book, speech, or 
sermon. And if he should try to make a living 'by 
making sentences, my word for it, he will find himself 
always learning and never able to compass the knowledge 
of his mother tongue, if his mother tongue is that of 
Chaucer and Goldsmith, Carlyle and Dickens, Fox and 
John Henry Newman. 

A few of us, a very few of us, have this rhetorical 
instinct largely developed to begin with. With such it 
is an endowment of nature as rare as it is wonderful and 
valuable. The rest of us, the great majority of us, have 
this sense or faculty small to begin with, and are there- 
fore dependent upon its stimulation and education. 

Besides, these grammatical rules and rhetorical prin- 
ciples are changing ; and usage has come to have as 



102 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

much authority as grammar or lexicon. We are told 
that the above-quoted rule about the subjunctive mood 
is doomed, and 1 can furnish plenty of the best usage 
for the substitution of " was" for " were," " most" for 
li more," and for such words and phrases as " won't," 
" don't," " no one else's," and " never read anything 
else but their Bible," etc. 

The perennial controversy over " the Queen's Eng- 
lish" and " the Dean's English," and Mr. Washington 
Moon's English, and Mr. Grant "White's English, and 
everybody's else English, indicates the chaotic state of 
things that has overtaken our unattainable mother tongue. 

When you reflect upon the quarrel over the question 
whether we shall patronize the Latin or Saxon words of 
our language, and the quarrel over the question, How 
shall we spell these words after we have selected them ; 
and the quarrel over the question, How shall we pro- 
nounce them after we get them spelled ; and the quarrel 
over the question, How shall we arrange them in sen- 
tences after we get them selected, spelled, and pro- 
nounced ; and the quarrel over the question whether our 
essayists are to pattern after Carlyle or Addison ; or our 
poets after Tennyson or Browning ; or our orators after 
Castelar or Wendell Phillips ; or our preachers after 
Robertson or Whitefield — I say, when you take all these 
quarrels into consideration, I am sure you will thank us 
sensible fellows among your educators for knocking the 
chains of Lindley Murray and Whately from your minds, 
and telling you to go forth free to indulge or to dis- 
cipline, to neglect or to cultivate your rhetorical instinct 
as you shall see fit, we never ceasing to admonish you, 
however, that whatsover you sow in the way of rhetori- 
cal judgment, that shall you reap in the way of rhetori- 
cal acquisition. 

. / 



i: 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 103 

In this rhetorical training you are to have an eye upon 

the rhetorical deficiencies of your audience, but you are 

not to allow your audience to dictate your 

rhetoric. The Audience 

The late Dr. Guthrie says he " drew ^ not to be the 
, . , T , J •! only Judge of 

his pen through every passage, even those the speaker's 

he thought best, which it required an ex- Rhetoric, 
traordinary effort to commit to memory, 
reasoning thus : If it does not make such an impression 
on my mind as to be remembered without much difficulty, 
how is it to impress others ?" This reasoning is against, 
not so much the passage, as the memoriter method of 
utilizing it. Its acceptance is made to turn upon (1) its 
adaptation to being committed to memory, (2) the im- 
pression it made upon the mind as well as memory of its 
author, and (3) his judging of its fitness from his 
memory to that of the audience. 

The same admirable public speaker tells us that he 
" catechised a class of young persons on his sermon" 
with this result : He " got a good account of introduc- 
tion and first head, meagre one of the second head ; the 
third was an utter blank ; while the peroration, when it 
was thought attention was blunted and patience ex- 
hausted, appeared to have impressed itself on their minds 
like a seal on wax." So he endeavored to (1) avoid the 
faults of the ill- remembered parts, and (2) to cultivate 
the style of those passages which had engaged the atten- 
tion and touched the feelings of his hearers. 

Is not the peroration designed to u sharpen blunted 
attention and revive exhausted patience" ? But does 
that prove that the perorative " style" should be culti- 
vated exclusively, or that the heads not remembered by 
one class of hearers should be cut off, or that heads 
which none remember should be avoided ? Some lost 



104 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

the introduction and three heads, and remembered only 
the concluding portion. Therefore let us have nothing 
but the concluding portion. But may not their recol- 
lection of the concluding portion have been dependent 
upon the portion that preceded it ? Some parts are re- 
membered by certain persons, therefore let us have none 
but those parts for all ! That reduces the duty of the 
audience to an exercise like that of a class in the recita- 
tion-room — an exercise of memory. Some parts do not 
touch the feelings, therefore let us have no parts but 
those which do touch the feelings. Has the public 
speaker, or even the preacher, nothing to do but touch 
the feelings ? 

Archbishop Tillotson, we are told by our setters of the 
preachers to rights, was in the habit of "rehearsing his 
sermons to an illiterate old woman of plain sense, and of 
bringing down his rhetoric to her level." Archbishop 
Tillotson was not quite right, even if his congregation 
was made up exclusively of illiterate old women, for it is 
the business of an archbishop and the bishops and other 
clergy to level up the illiterate old women, and not allow 
themselves to be levelled down by illiterate old women, 
and become learned old women, as, indeed, they are if 
they are forever being brought down by their audience 
instead of bringing up their audience to their level. 

Bishop Latimer, too, boasted that he " repeated him- 
self to annoy the learned in his congregation, and that 
he sought more the profit of those which be ignorant 
than to please the learned men." But are not learned 
men worth pleasing and converting ? Does not fishing 
for men include angling for learned men ? 

Martin Luther falls into the same fallacy. " When 
I preach," he says, "I sink myself deeply down; 
I regard neither doctors nor masters, of whom there 






THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 105 

are in the church above forty ; but I have an eye 
to the multitude of young people, children, and ser- 
vants, of whom there are more than two thousand." 

If the servants and children make the most of the 
audience, they should have the special attention of the 
speaker ; but why not regard the forty doctors and 
masters present ? Does the great commission enjoin dis- 
regard of doctors, especially when so many doctors of 
divinity need it as a remedy for themselves as well as for 
their hearers ? 

Cardinal Wiseman, on the other hand, was true to his 
name in giving to his hearers each his portion in due 
season, and with due seasoning. " Naturally florid and 
ornate, he could come down from his sweeping flights to 
trudging matter-of-fact in the presence of an audience 
that will tolerate nothing else." But whether the 
speaker is compelled to come down by the audience, as 
Dr. Wiseman was, or sinks himself down of his own 
accord in disregard of the impenitent doctors, as Dr. Mar- 
tin Luther did, or comes down to the ignorant in order to 
annoy the learned, as Bishop Latimer did, or levels him- 
self down for the exclusive benefit of the illiterate old 
women of the audience, as Archbishop Tillotson did, he 
comes far short of that breadth of training in the use of 
the will, and the judgment which is indispensable to the 
first order of excellence in the art of public speaking. 
He is not making the most of himself ; he is deficient in 
tact ; he does not know what he is about. He is a 
speaker whose rhetorical tact and judgment are wretch- 
edly out of repair, although it is quite possible for him 
to be thoroughly conversant with all the rules of Eng- 
lish grammar and sacred syntax and elocutionary gym- 
nastics. Such an error is one of judgment, and can only 
be corrected by correcting the judgment. 



106 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

The speaker's vocabulary is another attainment that 

comes to him by way of the rhetorical judgment, tact, 

and ear, and the use of the will. It is not 

Vocabulary to to be acquired by rote or rule, but by 

be Left to the training. Fox said: "I never want a 

Judgment. word, but Pitt never wants the word." 
Pitt's vocabulary was acquired. So is 
that of John Bright. He has always been a student of 
vocabulary. Gladstone says : " Constant and searching 
reflection on the subject will* naturally clothe itself in 
words, and of the phrases it supplies many will rise 
spontaneously to the lips." Yes, especially if the lips 
should happen to be those of Mr. Gladstone. lie has a 
genius for words. They are sometimes a snare to him, 
but the majority of us are not so ensnared or inspired. 
What comes to him by nature we must acquire by study, 
by the use of the ear that trieth words, by knowing what 
we and our words are about. 

Here again we are met by our arbitrary teachers, who, 
not content with dictating our gestures and emphasis, 
insist upon specifying the words that we are to use and 
the words that we are to avoid. They must be small 
words, or words of at most a couple of syllables, and 
they must be words with which everybody is familiar, 
and they must be words of Saxon origin. 

A learned and dull preacher of the English Church 
said recently in a public address : " Great effects are not 
now produced by great words. We have been a literary 
people long enough to have used up most of our big 
phrases. If any rhetoric wants teaching to those who 
are to lead others, it is the rhetoric of simplicity ; the 
art of expressing earnest thoughts in plain words. Not 
the outer sparkle, but the inner heat, kindles the sym- 
pathy of modern hearers. It is true, the day of flocking 



i 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 107 

after great orators is not gone by ; but the day of seeing 
through them is come." 

There is only one way of accounting for this con- 
temptuous reference to the dramatic and rhetorical ele- 
ment in public speaking on the part of a public speaker 
who lived in the country and age of Whitefield, Irving, 
Chalmers, Peel, Brougham, O'Connell, Erskine, Shiel, 
Fox, Pitt, Scarlett, and Gladstone. The learned dean 
was utterly deficient in comprehension or appreciation 
of the art of public speaking, and would reduce all 
other speakers to the drowsy cadences and monotonous 
intone with which he practised what he calls " the art 
of expressing earnest thoughts in plain words." The 
day of flocking after commonplace preachers has not 
gone by, but the day of seeing through their sour grapes 
has come. 

We thirty millions in the United Kingdom, and we 
fifty millions in the United States, will be much more of 
a " literary people" than we are before we can dispense 
with big phrases, just as w r e shall have to be much more 
of an artistic people than we are before we deny our- 
selves chromos or despise our engravings, as we are 
taught to do by Mr. Seymour Haden. To make 
the matter still more discouraging, some of our liter- 
ary people prefer John Gilpin to John Milton, and 
even look upon " Paradise Lost" as a mass of " big 
phrases" to be exchanged for the plain words of Jane 
Austen, which Lord Macaulay, one of the " literary 
people" of some note, preferred to even his own " great 
words" and " outer sparkle." 

The public speaker must use only w r ords of Saxon 
origin, according to those who in all probability have 
never yet paused long enough in their private conversa- 
tion to find out whether their vocabulary is of Saxon or 



f 



108 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

Sioux origin. Nor is it of any more consequence to 
him than it is to them whether his words came from 
the North Pole or South Africa, What we said about 
the voice we say about the vocabulary : its origin, 
its history, and its constituent parts are ail equally 
immaterial to the public speaker, however interesting 
they may be to the philologist. 

"Whately indorses what he calls the obvious rule laid 
down by Aristotle, to avoid uncommon and hard words, 
and prefers terms of Saxon origin because they will be 
more familiar to the hearers than those of Latin origin. 

In the first place, uncommon words are educational, 
and the speaker is an educator, a leveller up ; in the 
second place, the Latin word might be more intelligible 
than the Saxon word ; in the third place, any speaker 
who stops to study the history of his words will never 
have words enough or bread enough in his mouth to save 
him from starvation. 

Of what possible use is it to the speaker to know when 
he uses the word thunder that it has the same origin as 
the Latin tonitu, and that the root is tan, to stretch ; and 
that in Sanscrit the sound thunder is expressed by the 
same root, tan ? If his speech is improved by thunder, 
the word should be found in his speech, although his 
using that particular word is a reproof of those who see 
no use for any but the Saxon words of the English 
tongue, which contains deposits from every tongue. 
Max Miiller says : " Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, 
Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German, 
Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words lie mixed in the 
English dictionary." In this cauldron the public 
speaker is to find, and out of it to select and appropriate, 
his vocabulary, and with exclusive reference to its suit- 
ableness and effectiveness. 



) 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 109 

The absurdity of this Saxon partiality is all the more 
apparent when you reflect iipon the changes that have 
taken place in the so-called Anglo-Saxon tongue. Max 
Miiller says : " The language of Alfred is so different 
from the English of the present day that we have to 
study it in the same manner as we study Greek and 
Latin !" And yet it must not be studied so as to get 
any " discipline" out of it, because it is not one of the 
" dead languages." Why not get discipline and infor- 
mation at one and the same time by one and the same 
study ? When the English language becomes a dead 
language it will be treated with the respect which it now 
deserves as a live language. 

In a word, the English has come to be distinctly and 
separately a language of itself, and may be called Anglo- 
Italian, or, for that matter, Anglo-Hindustani, if you 
prefer calling it after the names of all its " dead " rela- 
tives to calling it by its rightful and Christian name. 
As we are a nation of foreigners, our tongue is a native 
language of foreign birth. 

Etymology is of no more use to the public speaker 
than entomology. In fact, it is as embarrassing to be 
paddling among the roots of your words as it is to 
be peering into a diagram to learn the uses of your 
diaphragm. Etymology is just as useless to the speaker 
as philology. The clamor for Saxon words is no 
more rational than would be the demand that all words 
should be used with their first signification, Christian, for 
example, and snob and radical and libel and officious. 

It is of far more importance that you should speak 
correctlv the words that now constitute the English Ian- 
guage, whatever be their origin or etymology, than that 
you should show partiality for Saxon or Latin words. 
In fact, it is of no consequence where the words pretty, 



110 BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 

across, window, method, here, getting, coming, and for, 
originated, but it is very important that you should not 
say pooty, acrost, winder, methid, yere, gettin', comin', 
and fur. 

Do not feel under obligation to read Homer because 
Bossuet and Curran did and Gladstone does, or Milton 
because Pitt did and John Bright does, or Dante because 
Robert Hall and Brougham did, or Burke because Ma- 
caulay did, or Demosthenes because Burke did, or 
Euripides because Fox did, or Barrow because Chatham 
did, or Chrysostom because Barrow did. Such an affec- 
tation is not only ridiculous, but hindering. You may 
be throwing away your time as some of these great 
speakers may have done, for it does not follow that their 
speaking was as much affected by their reading as they 
Sw supposed. Because a man is fond of reading Homer or 
Milton does not prove that they influence his rhetoric. 
In fact, an affectation of a partiality for Milton, and of 
indifference for Goldsmith, is not unknown among men 
of some renown. However, be this as it may, and be 
your rhetorical likings what they may, keep company 
with .good English, the best modern English, the best 
modern oratorical English. You are living in an age 
glorious for good English. Keep your eye upon its 
form, your ear upon its rhythm and cadence ; keep your 
sense of rhetoric sensitive to its quips and sentences and 
bullets of the brain. Think in good English, talk with 
as copious and varied a vocabulary as you can command, 
keep the door of your lips as sternly against the vulgar 
\ and ill-considered word as you do or should do against 
the intoxicating liquor or the indigestible food. 

Somebody, or a hearer of sermons who evidently 
thinks he is somebody in the matter of criticising preach- 
ers, says in the columns of the Spectator ; 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. Ill 

" A few Sundays ago I was coming out of a church, 
where I had heard a distinguished ec- 
clesiastic of the day, and overtook an ac- Be Thankful for 

quaintance who had been similarly occu- a ew n ivi - 
i c ua * Sentences 

pied. ' A wonderfully line sermon ! with a Good 

remarked my friend. 'Well,' I ven- Ring, 

tured to reply, ' individual sentences had 
a good ring; but I confess when he arrived at the 
end, I had not the least idea what the whole sermon 
was about. ' ' Oh, yes ! ' replied my friend, ' I did 
notice ihatS Now, sir, in the name of all that's won- 
derful, what meaning did he attach to the word ' fine,' 
and what had been the real cause of his enthusiasm ?" 

The distinguished ecclesiastic might retort that he had 
not the least idea what the whole criticism was about, 
and he doubted if his critic had. Was not his acquaint- 
ance as well warranted .in calling the sermon a fine one 
by reason of its individual sentences with their, good 
ring, as he was in sneering at it for want of what I pre- 
sume he has in mind, that everlasting " unity of dis- 
course," and the like, which the books on Sacred Syntax 
and Holy Hermeneutics insist upon? He would have 
thought and logic and unity for fifty-two Sundays of the 
year, and two of such sermons every Sunday, for he 
goes on to complain that the church-goer " does not like 
to be called upon to think" (in church), but prefers " a 
warm, equable trickle of religious prose-poetry, which he 
finds partly a stimulant and partly a sedative." This 
setter of the preachers to rights would have a sermon all 
stimulant, every sentence with a good ring, and the 
whole a repast equal to the requirements of his intellect- 
ual digestion. But suppose his was the only such diges- 
tive apparatus in the audience of the distinguished 
ecclesiastic. Should the rest of the sheep be starved 



112 BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

that this high-toned ram may be stuffed ? For my part, 
I suspect that there were quite enough of ringing, fine 
sentences in that sermon to justify its designation as a 
" wonderfully fine sermon," and that it was not alto- 
gether the fault of the sermon that its critic " had not 
the least idea of what the whole sermon was about." 
When he does not see the point, is it necessarily the fault 
of the point ? Is it indispensable to the success of the 
sermon that the hearer should know what the whole of 
it is about ? May it not be enough for him to know and 
feel and realize what a part of it is about — a ringing, 
stinging, individual sentence of it, for example ? Many 
such an arrow has gone home while every other missed 
of their mark, and may have gone home to some other. 
As a matter of fact, the most effective preaching is most 
effective with these arrows, whether stimulant or seda- 
tive, or both combined, and many a time the bow is drawn 
""at a venture, and many a preacher has acknowledged it. 
There are questions of tact in public speaking which 

can be settled only by the attainment of 
Questions to be what be called r h etorica j tact- 

Settled by Rhe- ^ J 1 - . . _ 

torical Tact. * or exam pl e > it ]S unwise to weary the 

imagination of the hearer, because you 
are sure by that means to weary his muscles and sinews. 
It will weary his imagination to be told at the start what 
you propose to accomplish before you stop. It will 
weary him to tell him that after yon have done so and 
so you will do so and so, and then so and so, and finally 
and in conclusion, so and so. Go on and do it. Say 
your say and be done with it. Never say : Before I 
pass to the preliminary remarks, by way of preface to the 
introduction to the first head of my sixteen heads, I 
w T ish to remark, in the first place, that — but, by the way, 
before I pass to that, I wish to say that, etc. 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 113 

We are told that the late Moses Stuart preached a 
sermon in which he (1) " occupied a large part of an 
hour telling his audience what he was not going to 
preach about, of errors he was not going to combat, 
giving (2) a sketch of the heresies alluded to, (3) a few 
strokes designed to show how easily they could be 
demolished if he should take the time, and (4) the real 
instruction for unlearned hearers who cared nothing for 
exploded theories was summed up in a few paragraphs." 
And yet the unlearned hearers were a majority of the 
congregation ! 

An astute and penetrating auditor of Dr. Liddon says 
of his preaching : 

" As we follow him from sermon to sermon, it is not 
difficult to detect the various intellectual tendencies of 
his sermons — to see at one point how he is combating 
some of the opinions of Mr. Mill, and at another how he 
has risen fresh from the perusal of the writings of Mr. 
Lecky ; how, again, he is combating the English forms 
into which the French system of Comte has thrown 
itself, and how, again, he is meeting the latest German 
rationalists before their newest errors have become 
naturalized in England ; once more, how he is crystalliz- 
ing vague, floating thought and difficulties on sacred 
subjects, or combating the full tide of secular opinion 
as found in such periodicals as the Pall Mall Gazette or 
the Saturday Review." 

Here is an opportunity for the speaker's rhetorical 
judgment and tact. Is this adroit or maladroit ? That 
depends upon the character of the audience. If Dr. Lid- 
don's hearers, or the most of them, knew what he was 
driving at as well as this one of them did, he may have 
been justified in this covert method of conducting a con- 
troversy, but I doubt it. If, however, very few of his 



114 BEFOKE AN AUDIENCE. 

audience could follow liis u vague, floating thought," his 
time and theirs was lost, miserably lost. 

Look out for vagueness under the guise of culture. 
Be not too thin. There is one element inseparable from 
the rhetoric of public speaking, and that is the carti- 
laginous element, physical earnestness in the diction. 
This animal force of which Carlyle was so enamored and 
of which he was so powerful a champion, compounded 
of iron and muscle, of the brain of the gods and the 
brawn of the brutes, always sits before you when you 
stand before an audience. Master it or it will master 
you. It is to be taken account of when you make 
rhetoric for it. The Apostle Paul made much of it. He 
taught the gentlest of all religions by means of meta- 
phors drawn from the wrestlers, the racers, and the war- 
riors. A veteran banker, who has been surrounded from 
birth with affluence and elegance, said to me : "I like 
my preacher to hit me a whack and knock me headlong 
occasionally." 

Rhetorically speaking he meant, of course, for it 
would hardly have done for his parson to try it literally. 
The preacher makes a mistake damaging to not only 
his style of speaking, but his auditors' style of hear- 
ing, if he supposes that a city congregation parted with 
their brutality when they took leave of their poverty, 
and hired a furniture dealer to furnish them with taste. 
( Scratch any rich man and you will come to the poor one."\ 
vThe new veneer is thin, the old character is thick. 

The setters of the public speakers to rights have been 
agitated by a large number of questions which are to be 
settled by the trained will, judgment, tact, taste, of the 
speaker, such as whether he shall read a manuscript in 
part or in full, or speak from notes, or write in full and 
commit, or write in part and commit, or think out and 



THE RHETORIC FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING. 115 

commit the thoughts, or think out a few heads and leave 
the remainder to be thought out in public, 

Sydney Smith said : " Reading sermons is a practice 
that stifles every germ of eloquence." Then reading 
sermons is a blessing, for it stifles many a germ of elo- 
quence that ought to be stifled just as the germs of 
malaria ought to be stifled. But it did not stifle the 
germs of Chalmers's eloquence or Dean Stanley's, 
although he, like many another reader, did his best to 
stifle an eloquent rhetoric with the approved Anglican 
intonation. Nevertheless, the brilliant dean did quite 
right in reading his sermons. His germ of eloquence 
would certainly have been stifled by an imitation of 
Sydney Smith's extempore " practice." 

I would not begin here by laying on a rule from with- 
out, but by training the judgment, tact, and taste from 
within. I would have the will set in motion. I would 
have the man know what he and his sermon or lecture 
are about, and 1 would have him seek to make the most 
of himself ; and if then he does not know by what 
method it is best for him to address an audience, 1 would 
advise him to go to hedging, ditching, or insurance, any 
honest calling, no matter what, and quit public speaking 
forever. 






YIIL 
A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 

The audience is an enormous factor in the speaker's 
calculations. An eye for his audience and quickness in 
reading it is another attainment of inestimable value, 
and one that is susceptible of indefinite cultivation. 

There are audiences and audiences. I have met them 
face to face and had all sorts of experiences with them, 
good, bad, and worse, from New York to San Francisco, 
from Land's End to John O'Groat's, from Cork to the 
Causeway. Let us have a talk about them. 

All foreign audiences are far more demonstrative than 
ours, and take far more liberties with the speaker. 
Even the regulation " applause," or clap- 
American and ping the hands, is by no means frequent 

oreign u 1- ^ ^. g conn ^- r y ou (. Q f fa e ] ar g e cities or 
ences Com- . J # ° 

pared. a political mass<meeting, where we ap- 

plaud, not so much our speaker as our side. 
In fact, it is very common for the lecturer to appear and 
disappear in the Great Republic without so much as a wink 
to cheer his despairing sense of oratorical collapse. I 
remember hearing the late M. Thiers, who was a very 
sensitive as well as vigorous orator, when it was truly 
said of him that he " became a little confused in his 
sentences because he was expecting applause which did 
not come." The French speaker misses it because the 
French audience is so given to it. Themistocles ex- 
claimed, upon receiving the plaudits at the Olympic 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 117 

festival, " This is the happiest moment I have ever 
known ! I now have the full reward of all my labors." 
The American lecturer would give half his fee for that 
same reward. The unhappiest moments of his life are 
spent in trying to earn the plaudits that never come. I 
have known him to stop and call the manager to him in 
the midst of the awful silence and whisper, What is the 
matter ? Are they mad at me ? An English audience 
divides its expressions of approbation between " Hear — 
hear," clapping of hands, and cheers ; and its disappro- 
bation is expressed, according to its kind and degree, by 
" Oh — oh !" which means I doubt it, or Ought you to 
say it; by " Time — time," which means that the 
speaker is taking more than his share of the oratorical 
proceedings; by ironical stamping, which means, We 
are tired of you, quit ; by hisses or " Shame — shame," 
which is the greeting given to anything specially out- 
rageous, as quoted by the speaker from an opponent, 
for example ; by " Louder — louder," which is no more 
prevalent than it is deserved ; by " Chair — chair," which 
indicates that the presiding officer is on his legs, and the 
debater must get off of his ; by " Question — question," 
which reminds the debater that he has wandered from 
the matter in dispute ; and by " Order — order," which 
is intended to silence unparliamentary language. Several 
of these, of course, will only be heard in a deliberative 
body. 

It is singular that, w r ith all our imitations of the Eng- 
lish, their " hear — hear" has never been adopted. It is 
a great convenience to both speaker and hearer. It is a 
go-between in the way of applause, and admirably fills 
the often necessarily chilling and protracted gap between 
utter silence and rousing acclamations. Then this free- 
dom of speech in the treatment of the speaker is of great 



118 BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

advantage to him. It keeps his mind upon the " ques- 
tion," his eye upon the audience, and his glance upon 
the clock. It is an excellent training for him to be re- 
minded, by the tap of the impatient heel, that audiences 
have rights which orators are bound to respect. And as 
often as I have heard this liberty of lip and limb exer- 
cised, I have never seen it abused. In the House of 
Commons and in Exeter Hall it is used with remarkable 
discrimination. 

Miss Thursby deplores the undemonstrative behavior 
of the American audience, and says in other countries 
" the feelings find quick expression," much to " the 
encouragement of the performer." Kean had the same 
experience in this country, and told his manager he 
" could not go on the stage again if the men kept their 
hands in their pockets. Such an audience would extin- 
guish Etna." 

All American speakers and actors who have had ex- 
perience abroad join in Miss Thursby 's lamentation, but 
her explanation is inadequate. 

Applause and hisses, hear — hear, and oh — oh, are con- 
ventionalities in England. Everything is conventional 
and traditional in England — the cheers of the commons, 
the obeisances at court, and the rowdyism of the students 
at the installation of lord rector. John Bull, whether a 
pig at the trough, a spaniel crouching at the feet of a 
lord, or a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour in 
Africa or India, is an animal governed by etiquette and 
traditions ; but when he applauds a fellow it makes a 
fellow feel very much obliged to him, whether the ap- 
plause comes of etiquette or enthusiasm. Even hissing 
has its advantages. It emboldens the speaker, who might 
otherwise leave his will un worked and let his fires go 
out. 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 119 

I was hissed by a Scotch audience for announcing a 
different lecture from the one advertised. I was quite 
right in supposing that the lecture I 
brought would interest them more than j n a r ow w jth 
the one they expected, but I was maladroit the Audience, 
in making the change. I w T as experienced 
enough to know that an audience is as testy as an indi- 
vidual. A change of subject cuts off their ears. Always 
stick to the advertised topic. Never rub the face of an 
audience the wrong way, unless indeed you have a case 
to argue with it, or an appeal to make for an unpopular 
cause. 

I was hissed again in Scotland — this time in Edinburgh 
— by the students of the University at the lecture before 
the Philosophical Institution. In view of a certain dis- 
cussion which was then and there agitating the educa- 
tional world, I took pains to say that in America, if a 
woman passed the examination, she was given the degree 
or admitted to the class. The undergraduates hissed, 
and 1 hissed back at them the obnoxious sentiment, and 
the rest of the audience came to my support with a hurri- 
cane of claps, stamps, and hear — hears.. What shall a 
man do under such circumstances I He has nothing to do 
but keep cool and look cool. What shall he say ? Why, 
"if any of the audience hiss," under such circum- 
stances " you may cry, Naw,. Hercules^ thou crushest 
the snake." But it would not have been adroit to say 
that to the audience that was simply teased by my bring- 
ing them a lecture that they had not bargained for. An 
American audience^ i^ould, in both these cases, have been 
less demonstrative^ ftjit just as resentful. The disap- 
pointed would have been sullen, the opponents of the 
women would have sulked or possibly left the house with 
reaky boots. 



120 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

1 have known this to be done to me for appearing in 
the place of another lecturer. In spite of the apologies 
of the manager, who said the promised orator was dead, 
or something or other equally conclusive, I forget now 
what, and in spite of my own conciliatory grins, there 
was no oh — oh or hisses as in Great Britain, but a move- 
ment and a getting up and going out with new boots on, 
as in America. Finally, an offensive partisan of the dead 
and gone lecturer, who was just sufficiently inebriated to 
know what he was about, arose and opened an argument 
with the chair, who answered him by ordering in the 
police, who carried him bodily from the hall. I felt by 
that time as if the hall were taking itself bodily from 
tinder me, and that I had nothing left now to stand upon 
but my dignity, and I could plainly feel that give way 
under me, although I did not betray that feeling to the 
audience. I waited for the intoxication of the enemy 
over his temporary success to subside, gathered my scat- 
tered forces in the way of faculties and audience, and — - 
went on with the lecture to its peroration, which I cast 
aside for one that I recalled of a far more victorious ring, 
and retired amid a burst of applause, and won the head- 
line of u a plucky lecturer" in the morning paper. 
The speaker at bay before an audience should never show 
the white feather, though it may be impossible for him 
to avoid a white feeling. A bold front may win his 
enemy ; a back down will lose his friends. 

One more, while I am in the mood for reminiscences. 
This is a case where I had to handle an audience that I 
was not allowed to see. An esteemed contemporary in 
the lecture field was suddenly bereft of his voice by a 
cold, and implored me to take his place in a neighboring 
town. It was only ten hours before the lecture. I 
hesitated, and expressed my awful dread ; but there was 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 121 

my professional duty, to say nothing of my obliging dis- 
position, and there was my friend imploring me with 
wheezing despair to take the letter of introduction and 
go. I took the letter of introduction and went. It was 
a gushing letter that my friend insisted upon sending. 
It even asserted that I could beat him lecturing hollow, 
and there were few lecturers, etc., etc. But all to no 
purpose with the lecture manager at Blankville. He 
read it under the kerosene flame of the depot, and re- 
marked, " It will not do, sir !" We parted, he for the 
audience and I for the hotel. The lecture which I was 
not allowed to deliver was to be delivered in an hour. 
Should I go to the church and insist upon a hearing, 
seeing that the man who had thus suddenly become my 
antagonist held the fort and the surrounding territory, 
and that I held nothing but my carpet-bag and the kcture 
in it, and knew nobody, not a soul. No, that would be 
bad tactics. I knew a better tactic than that. knew 
newspapering. I would newspaper him. I found a 
newspaper just going to press with its usual lack of a 
sensation. 

" Editor, I suppose?" 

" Yes, and you ?" 

" Lecturer, I suppose. Will you insert a card ?" 

" "Well — yes — I — I — suppose so. Why, what is the 
nature of it ?" 

I wrote the facts as I have herein narrated them. 
Came with letter from So-and-so to So-and-so, who said it 
would not answer, sir. Signed my entire name. Edi- 
tor's eye twinkled. Said that was all right, and added, 
By Jove ! or something that sounded like that, and asked 
lots of questions. Seemed to enjoy the whole affair 
much more than I did. Well, thought 1, he is no brother- 
in-law of the enemy, that's evident. I went home, the 



122 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

card came out, the town buzzed, the enemy was (so I 
was told) dumbfounded. He was importuned to say his 
say in another card, and he said he would, or perish 
in the attempt ; but he never did. I received an invita- 
tion to lecture on such date as would suit my conven- 
ience, signed by a long list of good and foremost citizens. 
I selected a date, was met by a band of music, escorted 
to the hall, which was jammed, and when I had struggled 
my way to the platform I had an uproarious welcome. 
Delivered the lecture, never alluded to the enemy, and 
we have never alluded to one another since ; and that was 
my experience in that town. 

Another time my trunk was detained, and I was 
obliged to lecture in borrowed plumage and stand in 
another man's boots in a very literal sense. I must have 
looked as I felt, for the reporter said, " He looked as 
solemn as if he had just come up out of the grave." If 
he had said mean instead of solemn, he would come 
nearer to my feelings. 

Another time I dropped my notes at the door of the 
hall in the dark, and when they were recovered only a 
part of them were discovered, and they were tail end 
foremost and inside out. 

Once in Glasgow it was my ill-fortune to be the last 
on a long list of speakers at a large public meeting. 
Hours passed and speakers spoke until it seemed to me 
that it would be wise in me to beg off for both my own 
sake and for the sake of the audience. I sent a note to> 
the chairman to that effect, and he ("William Graham, 
M.P.) replied in pencil as follows : u My impression is 
that the whole audience, or very nearly so, will remain for 
your address, and we should greatly regret its omj&sion. 
Scotch audiences can take a great deal of matter* — W. G." 
I was left to my own judgment and — vanity. I spoke, 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 123 

but my judgment had enough control over my vanity to 
make me brief. The weary audience applauded my con- 
sideration for them. 

These experiences will serve to show what a train- 
ing you who are going to be public speakers need in 
the use of the will, in self-reliance and self-possession, 
in general ship, in tact, in knowing what you are 
about. 

Audiences in Great Britain give a better average 
attention than those of ours, but ours are superior in ex- 
ceptional attention. Ours are quicker and 
more responsive toward what they regard Theirs for Av- 
as clever or a " good thing; 5 ' theirs are e ^g e > ° urs for 
better for the dead level of public listen- Attention, 
ing. In the old country there is a more 
uniform and decorous, in ours a more inconstant and ani- 
mated attention. There you are always sure, in the first 
place, of an audience, and, in the second place, of atten- 
tion. "Whether lively or dull, attention nevertheless it 
is. You have their eyes, which are not so easy to gather 
and hold in our country. You have not the constant 
dread there of losing your hold, which dread and appre- 
hension saps your composure in the land of free eyes 
and stiff knees. The audience helps you, because they 
feel under obligation to the occasion as well as to you* 
It is their opportunity as well as yours. They share the 
place and time and object with you. They may not be 
deeply interested, and it may be impossible to rouse them 
deeply, but they will look at you, and sit still, and greet 
you and your points with the conventional applause. 
You have no concern about their corporeal fair play, to 
say the least ; that they count due to civility, to 
decorum, to themselves if not to you, and that answers 
your purpose. 



124 BEFORE AH AUDIENCE. 

Their lecture audiences are perceptibly below ours in 
intelligence, but excel ours in that decorous long-suffer- 
ing which is so valuable to the speaker, whether preacher 
or lecturer. 

Audiences in England outside of the Established 

Church are weeded. To an American lecturer or 

preacher they have a picked-over ap- 

ic e -over pearance. The church takes the cream, 

Audiences. • ■■':' 

the chapel the milk of society. Car- 
riages at the chapel door are stared at. " Carriage 
people " is an English phrase, and such people are a sort 
of caste dependent upon, not their ancestry, but their 
wheels for their elevation. The shopkeeper holds them 
in reverence, the chapel-keeper drops his head as they 
pass. A deacon, speaking of a lady that he wished me 
to meet, took pains to repeat that she is a " carriage 
lady." She absolutely rides in a one-horse carriage to a 
Congregational chapel ! 

We recall Pepys's diary, in which he records how he 
66 went abroad with his wife the first time he ever rode 
in a coach," and how he " prayed God to bless and con- 
tinue to him " this inestimable English boon and boom. 
It is noteworthy, too, that Pepys ordered his coachman, 
on the first Sunday of the coach's existence, to drop him 
at the door of the church instead of at the door of the 
chapel, where he had been accustomed to worship God 
on foot. Nor can we overlook so recent an incident of 
a similar nature to be found in the diary of the late Lord 
Macaulay, who has transmitted it thus : " January 16th, 
1851. — At half-past seven the brougham came, and 1 
went in it to dine at Lord John Russell 1 s, pleased and 
proud. This is the first time I ever had a carriage of 
my own, except when in office." 

The popular audience in England begins with the 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 125 

middle of the middle class, and goes on down to the 
upper working class. The nobility of England would 
rather shoot pigeons than hear Huxley. It would be 
impossible to parallel Mr. Spurgeon's congregation in the 
United States, except so far as the United States fill his 
pews. There is no such unmixed classification outside 
of a very few churches in a very few great cities, and 
they are called " mission churches." 

But if this is a bad side of a class form of society (and 
upon that question we say nothing), there is what every- 
body will admit is a good side to it. It creates a conven- 
tional decorum and reverence that are difficult to secure 
without it, and that tell strongly and helpfully for the 
public speaker. 

It is not difficult to see from this social situation, with 
its evils and blessings, why audiences are more easily 
obtained and more easily held, when obtained, in Eng- 
land than in this country. Put together the lower 
average of intelligence and the higher average of rev- 
erence, and you have the solution. The standard of 
preaching and all other public speaking is lower, and the 
standard of hearing higher. There is more regard for 
the forms of worship and all other public forms, as there 
is for the formalities and civilities of social life, and less 
of querulous and restless impatience with public servants, 
whether in the pulpit, on the stump, in the lecture-room, 
or on " the government bench." An omnibus-driver said 
to me : " Fact is, none of us drivers need be afraid of 
losing our places, if we only keep sober and use our 
horses well." He had been on the box thirteen years ; 
others I know have been there for twenty years. It is 
just as easy for the lecturer, or professor, or preacher 
to stay thirteen or twenty years. They need not be 
afraid of losing their places if they keep sober and know 



126 BEF0KE AN AUDIENCE. 

how to hold their horses and their tongues ; and that is 
to be done only by the exercise of the will. 

The pre-eminent preacher, who reigns over his Board 
of Wearers and Tearers by sheer popularity with the pews, 
is just as much respected here as he is there, but the great 
mass of undistinguished usefulness has a foothold there 
that it has not attained in our country. Mediocrity draws 
as large a congregation there as superiority with us, while 
men who have extraordinary congregations there would 
never rise to the first place in America. Criticism of 
sermons, as compared with our attainments in that de- 
partment of human progress, is at a very low ebb, a very 
low ebb indeed. 

Make a study of audiences. It is quite the fashion, I 

observe, to suppose, or at least to insinuate, that lawyers 

are the only public speakers who should 

Reading the ma k e a laborious and constant study of 
Human Nature 1 . ., ,. 

of Audiences l mman nature as it appears m audiences. 

This is preposterous. There is no public 
speaker whose success does not depend upon his knowl- 
edge of the human countenance and the human disposi- 
tion, and his ability to read the latter by means of the 
former. Juries may not be, technically speaking, audi- 
ences, but audiences are invariably juries. They are to 
be confirmed in their opinions, if not converted to new 
ones, or, if they are simply to be informed or entertained, 
they must be conciliated, for if they are not conciliated 
they are alienated. They are very apt to take either one 
of these attitudes toward the speaker. 

Whether the lecturer teaches or simply amuses, he 
must look upon his audience as a jury to be carried and 
held, while a preacher who loses sight of this fact is sure 
to be lost sight of by his congregation. 

In fact, the traits, not to say tricks, that are so warmly 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 127 

commended in a successful attorney are precisely those 
which inhere in all public speaking. One of Lord 
Abinger's methods with a jury, it is said, " consisted in 
closely scrutinizing the faces of the twelve men in the 
jury-box. If discovering, as could often be done, that 
some one of them was distinctly superior to the rest in in- 
telligence and other qualities which influence common 
men, to this person, when addressing the jury, he espe- 
cially directed his eye and speech, winning the good- 
will of the flattered juryman, and through him the ver- 
dict sought for." 

The same closeness of scrutiny of the faces of the one 
hundred or one thousand in the audience box will yield 
the same result, and a similar method with the 
" superior " faces in a public congregation will produce 
a precisely similar result. The Duke of Wellington 
said: " When Scarlett is addressing a jury there are 
thirteen jurymen." When any speaker is addressing 
any audience of a hundred and seventy-two, there ought 
to be a hundred and seventy-three auditors. There is 
nothing in Scarlett's method with a jury, when the other 
side had a strong case, that does not apply with equal 
force in the discussion of any public question that divides 
public opinion where your opponent has the advantage 
of you in a matter of fact or of theory. " I avoided all 
appearance of confidence, and endeavored to place the 
reasoning on my part in the clearest and strongest view, 
and to weaken that of my adversary ; to show that the 
facts for the plaintiff would lead naturally but to one 
conclusion, while those of the defendant might be ac- 
counted for on other hypotheses ; and when I thought I 
had gained my point, I left it to the candor and good 
sense of the jury to draw their own conclusion. This 
course seems to me not to be the result of any consum- 



128 



BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 



mate art, but the plain and natural course which good 
sense would dictate." 

"What is here called good sense is only another name 
for the good judgment, tact, rhetorical adroitness, per- 
sonal address which I have insisted upon, but which 
is, as a rule, the result of consummate art, and certainly 
was the result of consummate art in the case of Lord 
Abinger. It is a " consummate art " to " avoid all ap- 
pearance of confidence" before a jury or an audience. 
It is the art of being natural. It is the common -sense 
that comes of uncommon training. " Scrutiny of faces" 
is susceptible of indefinite improvement. It requires 
experience and consciousness, and knowing what you are 
about, and the use of the will. It is impossible to those 
who forget themselves and think only of their subject, 
or to those who expect to acquire the art of reading 
human nature in human faces by acquiring the emphasis 
of Marc Antony's oration over the royal corpse of Julius 
Caesar. 

This observation and study of audiences is all the more 
necessary for the speaker because of the difficulty he has 
in discerning the opinion of his audience with reference 
to himself. 

The speaker must learn to read faces in an audience 
for the very good reason that that is about his only op- 
portunity for knowing what his audience thinks of him 
and his method. A preacher may spend a lifetime with 
the same congregation in utter ignorance of exactly what 
they think of his discourses. They will not speak, and 
he dare not ask ; nor is the newspaper report to be 
depended upon. It is never written by an audience. 
It is written sometimes by indifference, sometimes by 
malice, and sometimes by gush. " The other side" can 
see nothing in it, our side sees in it "the greatest effort 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 129 

of his life," and the considerate pew-holder tells his 
parson to his face that the " supply " preached " the 
greatest sermon he had ever heard." Sometimes one's 
miserable failure appears in the paper, under the manip- 
ulation of a judicious friend, as a rare triumph of elo- 
quence, while few sermons or lectures escape, in the 
atmosphere of self-interest or the town interest, from 
being " masterly," or the " ablest" thing of the kind 
ever known in that community. On the other hand, 
there are exceptions, very marked exceptions, when the 
report is prepared by absent indifference, or stupidity 
that was present, or malice that might have been either 
absent or present. You had one of those rare seasons 
of exaltation and exultation which occasionally come to 
the public speaker who works hard at his art, and strives 
to excel in it. You were carried out of yourself, and 
carried your audience out of themselves, and when you 
all got back to yourselves, and congratulated yourselves 
on your paroxysm of ecstasy, you had a glass of very 
cold water thrown in your faces in the shape of the little 
reporter's little report. The little reporter said in his 
little report that jou delivered rather an interesting dis- 
course on the whole, and it seemed, so far as he could 
learn, that it gave general satisfaction to a large extent. 
Whew ! The consequence is that the hearer's opinion 
will be modified by the little reporter's report. He 
will say : Why, was that the sermon I was so excited 
over ? I was evidently mistaken. 

You see, then, how necessary it is that the speaker 
should train himself to judge for himself as to how he is 
getting on with his audience. By this means he will 
learn, too, how long he is to speak, and with what method 
of discourse — another way of both training and using 
the judgment and tact so essential in the art of public 






130 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

speaking. " To make a speech is a knack ;" to read an 
audience is another knack. 

The audience which receives with apathy the lecture 
or sermon which another audience applauded is apt to 
irritate the speaker. It seems so unreasonable, and is so 
unexpected. Nevertheless, nothing is to be gained and 
everything to be lost by betraying your chagrin. Keep 
it to yourself. Make the best of a bad audience. The 
solution of the enigma lies in some atmospheric or mes- 
meric conditions which are beyond the reach of science, 
and you may as well give it up first as last. Grin and 
bear it, and try it again. 

Never show annoyance before an audience. Preachers 
have lost their pulpits, lawyers their cases, and lecturers 
their second invitation in consequence of speaking unad- 
visedly with their lips. ' i Little boy, ' ' said the preacher, 
" if you don't stop see-sawing your head I'll come down 
there and cut it off." He wished one minute after, and 
has wished all his life since, that he had allowed the 
youngster to see-saw to his head's content. Better that 
the boy should kill the sermon than the preacher should 
kill himself. The teeth of one lecturer were set on edge 
by the interruptions of an inebriated hearer, and the 
audience applauded the lecturer. But the lecturer, not 
content with his victory, alluded again and still again to 
the interruption long after it had ceased, and the audi- 
ence turned against the lecturer, who was finally hissed. 

Never put yourself in the wrong with an audience. 

It has every advantage of you. It has many heads to 

your one. Keep your audience on your 

side in every case of speaker vs. some one 

tunng. . 

hearer. This is where the speaker needs 
self-restraint and tact. 

What do you think of popular lecturing as a business 



A TALK ABOUT AUDIENCES. 131 

or profession ? 1 see it is sometimes described by a 
newspaper as " played out." 

Yes, occasionally a newspaper says, in its haste, " lec- 
turing is played out," and yet in that very issue there 
may be advertisements of three or four courses of lectures 
in full blast and paying well. Boston, New York, and 
Philadelphia average about one hundred lectures each a 
year. There were more lectures delivered last season 
in this country than during any previous season — prob- 
ably three thousand in all. 

" Played out' ? is the cynic's cant. Lecturing is played 
out just as newspapering is played out, or wall-papering, 
or school-teaching, or M.D.-ing, or preaching, or law- 
yering — some of those who are engaged in it have played 
out, or are playing out, or will play out. That is all 
there is of that. 

If any branch of human industry is indestructible, it is 
public speaking ; and no branch of public speaking is less 
likely to become extinct, while the human epiglottis sur- 
vives, than lecturing. It is the oldest method of public 
instruction, and if any method of public instruction be- 
comes extinct, it will not be lecturing. It is far more 
likely to be competitive cramming, or the wonderful 
" marking system." The university grew out of the 
lecture, and continues to be dependent upon it. Law, 
medicine, theology, science, and philosophy are taught 
by means of it, because it is the best means of teaching 
them. 

There are 136 lecturers at Munich and 118 at Got tin- 
gen. 

What is known as " popular lecturing " is the same 
thing with a difference, as this most ancient, and most 
powerful, and most satisfactory of all the methods of 
public education. It degenerates, of course, into mere 



132 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

amusement on the one side, and evaporates into mere 
mist and fog on the other, and therefore gets itself 
sneered at by some for being frivolous, and laughed at 
by others for being metaphysical, and described by all as 
u played out." 

Why, even bad lecturing is not played out. The 
shallowest sham succeeds in this, as in every other de- 
partment of North American ingenuity. So does the 
flattest kind of humor. A notoriety in any other walk 
of life draws and pays in this. A veteran politician 
whose political luck has " retired " him, a coiner of jests 
in bad spelling, or an aesthete and his two calves, will 
find the towns so numerous, and public curiosity so 
curious, that he can lay up quite a snug sum before he 
is found out. Once round and he is in funds. Once 
round takes, say, about five years, and three thousand 
dollars a year would be fifteen thousand dollars. 

Our esteemed contemporaries may set it down for a 
fact that the lecture business, like the newspaper busi- 
ness, is largely dependent upon its management. When 
that plays out, in either department, " all is lost except 
honor." But if either can run without management, it 
is not the newspaper. For, come what may, the art of 
the lecturer is absolutely indestructible. 









IX. 
HOW TO THINK OF SOMETHING TO SAY. 

The public speaker can have no more faithful self- 
discipline than that which comes of his thinking of 
something to say to his audience. It is not thinking of 
something to say in a book or an essay, in a magazine 
or newspaper article, it is thinking of something suitable 
and effective to say when you get upon your legs before 
an audience. Nor does it matter whether you are going 
to write down what you have thought out and commit it, 
or whether you intend to write and read, or whether your 
plan is to make your speech out of what you have 
thought of beforehand and what you will think of on the 
occasion. It is the great faculty of improvisation which 
Quintilian makes so much of, and which is one of the 
most useful and fruitful faculties a public speaker can 
bring into subjection to his will. It is the art of extem- 
pore thinking as well as speaking. 

As the public speaker should always be Always Think- 
a student in public speaking, he will al- in £ in Pnvate 
ways be at work with all his will, energy, to s in Pu £_ 
and memory, and his ear for rhetoric and ii c . 

elocution, improvising and extemporiz- 
ing ; he will always be thinking of something to say 
to the audience or audiences which he expects to address. 

An editorial friend says : " I never come upon a 
thought, fact, or incident without asking myself how I 
can get an article out of it." . The speaker asks : How 



134 BEFORE AN" AUDIENCE. 

shall I utilize it for my audience ? He should be the 
most alert-minded man in the world. He should get 
into the habit of picking up something from everybody, 
and everything and everywhere. A robin should not be 
more indefatigable in gathering insects for her young. 
He should have the Dickens eye for seeing everything, 
and the Dickens knack for turning everything to ac- 
count. 

He will say : Here is an incident. I'll tell it to my 
audience, but first I'll tell it to myself. So he goes over 
it mentally, silently, thoughtfully. He tells it to him- 
self in the very best words he can command. He seeks 
to make a gem of effective simplicity out of it, a bit of 
good painting done at a stroke or two. It is this doing 
your narrative or descriptive at a dash or two that tells, 
and it is this that you learn how to do in learning how 
to think of something to say. The more you do at it in 
this conscious, disciplinary way, the sooner it will come 
easy and the easier it will become. 

The memory gets its culture out of this rehearsal. I 
repeat that the best improvisations are improvised be- 
forehand. The best impromptu speeches are committed 
to memory. The difficulty is to remember the something 
that you have thought of to say. The premeditated 
felicity cannot be recalled on the occasion of the ad- 
dress. Thackeray thought of his best things in the cab 
on his way home from his speech, during which he could 
not recall them to save his life. My latest failure in this 
line of human endeavor is so recent as to be still poig- 
nant. I could hardly have made such a fist of my part 
at the laying of the corner-stone, if I had had laid in me 
the corner-stone which I am trying to lay in the com- 
ing public speakers. This exacting and unremitting self- 
discipline in learning how to think of something to say 






HOW TO THINK OF SOMETHING TO SAY. 135 

will prevent this failure of memory, if anything will. 

It is a training that includes the memory as well as the 

will, the judgment, and the ear for rhetoric. 

You will have this thinking habit in action while you 

are listening to other speakers. You will 

note their vocabulary, their illustrations, Thinking for 

what takes and what 'falls flat. You may Yourself while 

d Listening to 
be surprised to find that there are some others. 

admirable and handy words which you 
never use, and some forms of public address which you 
have never tried. This is not " forgetting yourself, and 
thinking only of your subject." This is the thinking of 
yourself which gives you power over yourself. Forget 
anybody but yourself, your best self, the self which the 
Prodigal Son came to when he came to himself, and which 
every man must come to if he would come to anything. 
Remember only to get rid of your other self, your self of 
silly bumptiousness, your flap-and -crow oratorical vanity, 
and all that species of consciousness which is always put- 
ing in its thumb and pulling out its plum, and saying, 
"What a great man am I ! The serious and conscientious 
public speaker, who is under training for his art, despises 
all that sort of consciousness, and rolls it as a sweet mor- 
sel under his — feet. Forget anybody but yourself, but 
forget nobody. Remember everybody. In thinking of 
something to say to your hearers, think especially of your 
hearers. 

Thinking of the audience is indispensa- Thinking cf 
ble in learning how to address it — with * -rw*^ 
what method and rhetoric. of something 

" He was tedious." That was because to Say to It. 
he " forgot himself, and thought only 
of his subject." In forgetting himself he forgot his 
hearers, or he would not have closed their ears with 



BEFORE AK AUDIENCE. 



weariness. Nor could it be complained that u he fires 
over their heads," if he did not forget them in for- 
getting himself. Self-discipline and training would 
have taught him that firing over their heads will never 
win their hearts. Moreover, the method is no com- 
pliment to the man who resorts to it. Nothing is 
easier than to bamboozle an audience with the vocabu- 
lary of books which they never read ; on the other 
hand, " how much learning it requires to make these 
things plain." Here is where education gets its raps, 
and deserves them. "When one of the u self-made " hits 
the mark, and one of the " educated " hits only the tar-^ 
get, there is a hurrah for the self-made and a groan for 
education. Self-made thought of his audience, Educa- 
tion thought only of his subject. Consciousness of the 
audience is indispensable to the right treatment of the 
subject. Why prepare sermons for the other man's con- 
gregation ? 

This rigid, exacting, and unremitting discipline bears 

fruit when the speaker is detailed to make 

A Short Speech a gli0rt gp^^ at g^^ no ti C e. A better 

tice opportunity he could not have or a more 

valuable lesson in his difficult art. 
He is the rare speaker who knows how to hit the pur- 
pose of the occasion in a brief speech. The best of 
orators and advocates fail here. All of us have time to 
make a long sermon ; few have time, or will take 



time, to make a short one. Any one might make the 
ten-minutes' speech, if he were allowed ten minutes in 
which to get under way. But to throw it off without 
prelude or apology or hesitation — this is just one of those 
attainments in the art of being natural which is as un- 
usual as the discipline and training that compass it. 
But we should sometimes leave our speech to the 



HOW TO THIN"K OF SOMETHING TO SAY. 137 

occasion, or what is called u the inspiration of the mo- 
ment," should we not ? 

Of course you may have to ; but suppose the occasion 
fails to inspire, but, on the contrary, is so contrary as to 
take away your speech instead of giving you one ? To 
provide against this contingency is the object of the dis- 
cipline and training that come of thinking of something 
to say. Furthermore, this training is indispensable, if 
we would know how to make the most of the occasion, 
whether inspiring or dispiriting. The more there has 
been of this mental preparation for the occasion, and for 
all similar occasions, the more the occasion will yield in 
the way of inspiration and suggestion. 

Will not the audience compel us to think of something 
to say when we stand before it ? Yes. A man whom 
no conversation can get a word out of will be voluble 
before an audience. Some men think of nothing except 
when they get upon their legs to speak, and in the case 
of some they think of nothing then. It is a knack to 
make a taking speech with nothing in it. 

But the audience disconcerts the diffident and em- 
boldens the bold. It will fill the mouth of the conceited, 
and tie the tongue of the modest. The most experienced 
of speakers suffer from audience fright. There is no 
better remedy for this than the habit of keeping your 
hearers in mind while you are thinking of something to 
say to them. To realize their presence by an effort of 
the imagination is to fortify against their faces in the 
flesh. 

One of our Commencement orators said to me while 

his predecessor was speaking : " I am shaking in my 

hoes ; how shall I get over my nervousness ?" Summon 

your conceit, your sense of superiority to the mass of 

towns- people, pretty girls and their undergraduates, who 



138* BEFORE AST AUDIENCE. 

make up the audience. Look them square in the face, 
and say to yourself, and say it resolutely : " I will not 
be put down." That mental action will hold you up. 

The student did indeed think of the audience, but he 
thought too highly of it. He overestimated its intelli- 
gence. He did indeed think of himself, but he thought 
too modestly of himself. He is that uncommon kind 
of student. He underestimated his ability to cope with 
the undergraduates and their parents. His panic came, 
after all, of not thinking correctly of himself and his 
audience. The audience capitulated as soon as he 
showed that he considered himself its master. This lion 
in our path will lower his tail, if we only look him in the 
eye. 

And it is this looking an audience in the eye that the 
young speaker needs to practise. There is no substitute 
for it. 

" Don't do your practising on an audience," an old 

preacher tells the young preachers. On 

Le * rn t° Face whom shall they do their practising, then, 

Facing* it their looking-glass ? The old preacher 
practised on an u imaginary audience." 
But a real audience is the best. The realer the young 
speaker makes his audience the realer he will be himself, 
his subject, his delivery, his object and all. You will 
never learn how to think and speak and behave before 
an audience of men and women by practising before an 
audience of bedposts or apple-trees. 

Few have the industry for this unreal rehearsal work. 
We are all as lazy as circumstances will permit. We do 
only what we are compelled to do. You must put your- 
self under the necessity of making a real speech to a real 
audience. Besides, the real audience awakens and flatters 
the ambition as nothing else does or can. If the speech 



HOW TO THINK OF SOMETHING TO SAY. 139 

is not made in public it is not public speaking, and pub- 
lic speaking is what you are trying to learn. 

A setter of the preachers to rights says : " The prin- 
ciples of the art of oral address should have been mastered 
by the preacher before he has authority to enter the 
pulpit." As well say the principles of the art of mas- 
tication should be mastered before the boy is allowed to 
eat. There are no principles of the art of oral address 
aside from the oral address itself. To separate the prin- 
ciples from the practice is to make both useless. 
u Grammar was made after language, and therefore ought 
to be taught after language." Elocution was made with 
language ; it should be taught, not before or after, but 
with the language, the very language we use in speak- 
ing, not the language of another on another occasion. 

Did not Demosthenes practice in a cave ? Yes, but 
that was with gravel in his mouth, to cure an impediment 
of speech. If you have a defect that requires gravel in 
the mouth, by all means do your practising in a cave ; and 
if you are taking lessons in instrumental music at the 
same time, take your piano with you. 

Carlyle was about right when he said : " The public 
speaker is as the ass whom you took and cast headlong 
into the water. The water at first threatens to swallow 
him, but he finds to his astonishment that he can swim 
therein, that it is buoyant and bears him along. One sole 
condition is indispensable — audacity, vulgarly called im- 
pudence. Our donkey must commit himself to his 
watery element, in free daring strike forth his four limbs 
from him. Then shall he not drown and sink, but shoot 
gloriously forward and swim, to the admiration of the 
bystanders. The ass, safe landed on the other bank, 
shakes his rough hide, wonder-struck himself at the 
faculty that lay in him, and waves joyfully his long ears ! 



140 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

So, too, the public speaker !' ' The great Thomas was not 
much of a public speaker, but he did know how to wave 
joyfully his long ears. You will never learn how to 
behave, or speak, or think before an audience until you 
appear before one. Commit yourself. You will never 
learn how to swim unless you plunge in and strike out. 

Never wait till the subject is ripe before you pluck it. 
Pluck it and ripen it. While you are waiting for it to 
ripen, somebody else will secure it. Be quick to not only 
44 take a hint," but to utilize it. A suggestion grows 
with nursing. You will be surprised to find how rapidly 
you acquire knowledge of that which you were hereto- 
fore utterly ignorant, by imparting what you know to 
others. Teaching teaches the teacher. If you would 
learn any branch of knowledge, take a pupil in it. You 
will many a time, like Rousseau with his love letter, " be- 
gin your speech without knowing what you are going to 
say, and end without knowing what you have said," and 
yet what you have said may be very much the thing you 
should have said. Many a sermon that is a blank to its 
preacher was effective with its hearer. 

However, while a real audience is the best audience, it 
need not be the only one. An unreal one by all means if 
you have no other, or are afraid to face the other yet. 
Rehearsal is as invaluable to the speaker as it is to the 
singer or actor. And it is all the more useful for being 
aloud, or " in cold blood," as Walpole said when he was 
asked by the Kit-kat Club to rehearse the speech he in- 
tended to make against the expulsion of Steele from the 
House. He said " it was impossible to deliver a speech 
in cold blood, but he would try." He did try, and suc- 
ceeded. He made a good speech to the club, and a 
better one in the Commons. Undoubtedly the speech 
in the House was far better for having been rehearsed 



HOW TO THINK OF SOMETHING TO SAY. 141 

at the club. But the first audience was not unreal, it 
was only less real than the second. 

It is wonderful how the simply knowing that you have 
a speech to make will help you to create 
it. Your trying to think of something to Making a 
say seems fruitless. But you will find Pro ^ ng Q ne# 
that it is not fruitless. That silent, fruit- 
less concentration was concentration, nevertheless. You 
did not realize that it was, but it was, and your speech 
or sermon was the better for it. The sudden burst of 
something to say when the occasion comes for it is the 
fruit of the unpromising and apprehensive effort. The 
very apprehension helped. The apprehensive tempera- 
ment is like nervousness, bad for one's happiness, but 
good for one's speaking. 

During the preparation you should shave yourself, or 
read some in a well- written book, or do an errand for 
your wife, or make a call and have a chat, or take a 
frolic with the children. It is positively funny to ob- 
serve how underneath all this the mind is trying to think 
of something to say, and will not be diverted from its 
purpose, and is actually assisted by the diversion. 

This importunity of his work should be the preacher's 
advantage. Two sermons every one hundred and sixty- 
eight hours constitute quite an upper and a nether mill- 
stone for grinding something to say out of him. And 
yet the advantage may easily become a disadvantage. 
Prodding, while it quickens some, deadens others. They 
give up after a round or two, and the rest of their work 
is the veriest humdrum. Subjecting yourself to the 
training and discipline of thinking of something fresh 
and appetizing to say will prevent this fatal panic. Give 
yourself exclusively to thinking of something to say, and 
you will have no time to think of how much you have 



142 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

to say. The most fertile preachers have the sense of 
running dry, in which their congregations sometimes 
share. 

Putting yourself under obligation to be on hand with 
something to say is a great aid in learning how to think 
of something to say. Give your note for it. Then be- 
stir yourself to raise the wind. 

While you are thinking of something to say you will 
be surprised and delighted to observe how every speech 
that you hear, and every book that you pick up, and every 
conversation you have, and every newspaper you read 
will contribute something to your budget of material. 
Then you must not fail to make use of this material, 
whether exactly to your liking or not. Do your best 
with the best that comes to you. When better comes, 
substitute it, but until it comes work up and work off 
the material you have on hand. You will do better 
next time by doing your best this time. 

It is not necessary while you are thinking of something 
to say that you should " read up " on the subject of your 
address. You may not be able to find anything of that 
kind to read. Read the best English language you can 
find. Read, write, and converse in the best vocabulary 
that comes to you, and compel a better vocabulary to 
come to you. There is always room for improvement in 
the words of our mouths. Reading, writing, and con- 
versing with this under-thinking going on creates facility 
and felicity in the use of language in public. The 
memory becomes charged with words, images, meta- 
phors, ideas, and phrases that press for utterance under 
the stimulus of the occasion or the excitement of ambi- 
tion. Try it. 



THE RIGHT SHAPE FOE AN AUDIENCE- 

ROOM. 

Such paragraphs as these frequently appear in the 
newspapers, and they contain no more disheartening or 
inexcusable bit of news. 

" There are at least a dozen churches, some in Brooklyn, 
some in New York, some in Boston, in Springfield and 
in Chicago, each costing over $200,000, that are utterly 
worthless as places of worship." 

" Externally, Tompkins Avenue Church is beautiful to 
look at. It is cruciform in style, florid Gothic in design, 
and ornamented to the very spire. The building and 
furnishing are said to have cost a quarter of a million. 
Nobody can fill the house, for nobody can speak in it 
or hear in it. The roof looks like the headquarters of a 
telegraph company. Bunches of telegraph-wires run 
lengthwise and crosswise of the church. It was thought 
that these would break the echo. The platform has been 
brought into the centre of the church, and a screen put 
in the rear to aid the sound of the voice, but with little 
success. Architects now say that the interior of the 
church must be entirely changed, galleries put in, floor 
raised, ceiling altered ; in other words, a new church 
internally must be constructed." 

The late President Finney said of the Broadway Taber- 
nacle : " The plan of the interior of that house was my 
own. I lmd observed the defects of churches in regard 



144 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

to sound, and was sure that I could give the plan of a 
church in which I could easily speak to a much larger 
congregation than any house would hold that I had 
seen." His experience with the architects was exactly 
like that described by those who planned the sensible 
interior of the Brooklyn Tabernacle : they haughtily re- 
fused to sacrifice their sublime art to the exigencies of 
acoustics. " An architect was consulted, and I gave 
him my plan. But he objected to it, that it would not 
appear well, and feared that it would injure his reputa- 
tion to build a church with such an interior as that. I 
told him that if he would not build it on that plan he 
was not the man to superintend its construction at all. 
It was finally built in accordance with my ideas, and was 
a most comfortable place to speak in." 

My experience confirms the popular complaint of 
ecclesiastical acoustics. 

Just before ascending the pulpit stairway of one of 
these " utterly worthless places" of pub- 
Echoes to li c worship, the noble martyr of the place 
Right of Him, t0Q k me ag j ( j e an( j warnec l me against the 
Echoes to LrGit 

of Him. slightest variation to the right or left 

during my lecture. I must stand stock 
still and look straight before me. If I did not, if I 
turned one inch to the right or left, I would hear whis- 
pers enough to tell the secrets of all mankind. Of 
course I thanked the parson and — did just what he told 
me not to do ! I was all curiosity to hear the whispers. 
"Whispers ! If all the snakes of all the Zoological Gar- 
dens had hissed upon me then and there, I am sure I 
could not have been more startled than I was by those 
echoes that rushed upon me from every direction. 

We are going to remedy it, and have been going to 
remedy it for five years, and will be going to remedy it 






THE RIGHT SHAPE FOR AK AUDIENCE-ROOM. 145 

for five or twenty-five years more. I dare say it could 
be remedied for five dollars. How far should a preacher 
go in the toleration of such stumbling-blocks ? I would 
rather preach under a tree, especially if there were light 
enough from the conflagration of that house of God to 
read for the lesson of the evening : " Lay aside every 
weight," etc. 

Recently I undertook to deliver a course of lectures in 
an elegant new hall which had just cost the taxpayers 
about $12,000, and was obliged to succumb to the snakes 
after the first lecture. Wires were tried without avail — 
a remedy which has been, I believe, generally aban- 
doned. We had to quit the chapel of a college in 
another town for the same reason. A church which 
cost the hard earnings of a village congregation to the 
extent of about $16,000, only two years ago, behaves in 
the same way. Fancy the outlook of that congregation. 
Imagine the consequences of a reputation of that kind 
attached to a church, one of whose wisest members said 
to me : " We would gladly exchange the new house for 
the old barn if we could." In several towns I was told 
that the sale of season lecture tickets was seriously inter- 
fered with by the inability to hear in the hall or church. 
In some cases the money had to be refunded, and in one 
case at least the course came to an abrupt end, because 
the ticket-holders refused to attend where it was so 
difficult to hear. " We shall not try it again until we 
have a new hall/' says the president of the lecture 
committee of one of the best lecture towns 
in the State. The Shape Re- 

The remedy for the consequences of ,Jj|^ 
violating a natural law is obedience to tics 

that law. The laws of acoustics are, 
it is true, not all easy of access and understanding ; but 



146 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

some of them are. For example, it seems evident that 
the sound goes off from the speaker's mouth in vibra- 
tions similar to the waves created by the stone thrown 
into the water — circular if it can, semi-circular if it must. 
Hence the semi-circular, or horse-shoe form of auditory, 
to compel the vibrations to take that form ; and hence 
there should be nothing to prevent their taking that 
form. Again, the voice of the speaker will fill, or try to 
fill, the entire space of the place in which he speaks, be 
it small or large, round or square or oblong, high roofed 
or low roofed, whether bristling with angles and projec- 
tions or bounded by a uniform and smooth concave sur- 
face, whether abundant in alcoves and recesses or entirely 
free from them. As it will go out doors if you leave 
the doors open, or through the roof if you leave a hole 
in it, so it will find its way to every open space within 
the edifice where wall and roof and door prevent its 
escape. In short, the voice of the speaker, like the 
wind, goeth where it listeth, and can only be prevented 
from going where it is not wanted by being compelled 
to go where it is wanted. It will go where it is wasted 
unless you force it to go where it is wanted. It is wasted 
if it rambles into recesses or vestibules, or lofty arches, 
or acute angles of the church, since, it is wanted only in 
the pews. 

Manifestly, then, the fewer of such places there are for 
the speaker's voice to waste itself in, the more expedi- 
tious it will be in reaching the places it is designed to 
fill, and the more effective it will be when it does reach 
them. The voice will scatter much or little, or none, 
according as you provide a place or places for it to scatter 
in. Restrain it to the place and space which contains 
your audience. 

Again, the waves of sound naturally rise as they pass 



THE RIGHT SHAPE FOR AN AUDIENCE-ROOM. 147 

from the speaker's mouth. They go up of themselves, 

so to speak ; they go down by compulsion. They require 

little more than mere utterance to send v 

them above you ; they require positive Tne Speaker 

exertion to send them below you. The ~ 0U T , e " 

«-,,, , , ,. low Instead of 

notes oi the bugle are heard more dis- Above the 

tinctly on the tops of the houses than Audience, 
on the street. " From peak to peak 
leaps the live thunder." The valleys have but a 
faint share in the awful reverberations. The pit, or the 
ground floor, is the worst place in the house for hearing 
either the speaker, actor, or singer. The reason is 
obvious. Sound, especially articulate sound, goes below 
its utterer reluctantly and resentfully, but goes above him 
cheerfully and with alacrity. 

The hearer should be above instead of below the 
speaker. The seats should rise as they recede from the 
rostrum or pulpit, if speaking and hearing without an 
effort is an object worth attaining. The superabundance 
of exertion used by the speaker comes of his being obliged 
to force his voice down the hypothenuse of a right-angle 
triangle. He stands at the top instead of, as a law of 
acoustics requires, at the bottom of the hypothenuse. 
He has the wear and tear of shouting from the summit 
of the hill to those at the base, instead of having the 
pleasure of talking without exertion from its base to those 
on its summit or its sides. This horseshoe rising seat 
form, which was invariably adhered to by the ancients, 
and has been perpetuated by the architects of theatres to 
this day, was doubtless suggested by the out- door ex- 
perience of public assemblies. They gathered on the sides 
of the hill, and the speaker stood at the bottom. Who- 
ever has spoken in a theatre or opera-house knows how 
much easier and more agreeable it is to speak there than 



148 BEFORE AH AUDIEKCE. 

in a church, and whoever has been a listener to both 
sermon and drama will note how easy it is to hear even 
the bungled whispers of the actors, and how difficult it is 
to catch the words of the most painstaking preacher. 
Again, every hearer should be able to see the speaker, 

since seeing him plainly is indispensa- 
The Speaker bl e to hearing him distinctly and un- 
ShoMSee derstandin g him perfectly. This is self- 
Each Other. evident and needs no argument ; but it 

needs iteration and reiteration. " My 
people will not consider," or they would not be car- 
ried away by a pretty " elevation," without consider- 
ing whether it is rational or absurd with reference to 
the all-important matter of hearing and speaking. It 
is impossible for one half of the people on the level 
floor of our churches to see their preacher without 
twisting their heads, which is one of the universal 
" bodily exercises " of our Sunday congregations. And 
if you lean aside you are sure to obstruct the view 
of some fellow-listener, who must also change his posi- 
tion in order to do what the architect should have enabled 
him to do without leaning to the right or left — look the 
speaker full in the face. In a properly constructed 
semi-circular auditory, a straight line could be drawn from 
the mouth of the speaker to the eye of every hearer, 
without going through anybody's head. This can be 
done if the proper gradations are observed in the eleva- 
tion of the floor, and the proper proportions are obtained 
in the construction of the semi-circular or horse-shoe 
form. When these gradations and proportions are se- 
cured, the speaker will be able to look every one of his 
hearers square in the eyes without turning his face to 
the right hand or to the left — which, by the way, is one 
of the bad habits of preachers. 



THE RIGHT SHAPE FOR Aff AUDIENCE-ROOM. 149 

The platform pulpit of this country is immensely 

superior to the lofty tubs of Great Britain, but one 

considerable step more will have to be 

taken before the American pulpit is Architecture 

constructed with reference to the pew Should not be 
-,.,,!-, - , . rn! an Obstruction 

according to the laws 01 acoustics. Ihe t p ... 

American preacher is still at the wrong Speaking, 
end of the hypothenuse, and still has 
some excuse for resorting to the bellow and yell in 
the utterance of passages which should be spoken in 
a colloquial tone. But whether he is excusable for 
submitting to the oblong, level-floored form of audience- 
room in which he is to preach is another question. He 
certainly ought to know that the more exertion he is 
obliged to use in making himself heard, the less he will 
have with which to make himself felt. He should have 
the full use of his faculties and powers without drag 
or embarrassment from the ill-construction or malforma- 
tion of the place in which he speaks. There should be 
nothing in the form or shape of the auditory calculated 
to prevent what the speaker has to say from being spoken 
and heard with perfect ease. The lowest conversational 
tones should be heard as distinctly in a church as in a 
theatre ; and they will be when (as in the case of the 
Brooklyn Tabernacle) the auditory of the church is con- 
structed on the same principles as that of the theatre. 
In the old countries the university and scientific lecture 
rooms are all constructed in this raised-seat form, and 
so are a few halls in this country ; but in the case of 
several modern churches and halls, there is the merest 
beginning. The reform has only learned to creep. It 
will be a long while before it will be able to walk erect 
and show itself equal to the task of confronting one of 
the most perverse of perversities. 



150 BEFORE Atf AUDIENCE. 

The speaker should stand with his back, as near as may 

be, to a solid wall, between the calks of the horse-shoe. 

Indeed, one of the most important of 
Hard Walls. - ' . , . . l , 

the conditions ior easy hearing and easy 

speaking is, that the walls of the auditory should be 
constructed of stone, the thicker the better. "Wooden 
walls are resonant, especially when they are hollow, 
as is the case with lath-and-plaster walls. The surface 
of the wall should be plain stone, which sheds the 
sound without absorbing or mangling it. Of course 
it may be said wooden walls " will do." Yes, any- 
thing " will do ;" wooden heads will do, a wall made 
of drums laid side to side will do — so will a tin pan 
roofed in, if it is big enough. We are not talking about 
what will do — or rather we are talking about, and 
against, what will " do " the speaker, or preacher, by 
tearing his throat, and wearing his nerves, and prema- 
turely bringing on the " Whereas it has pleased Divine 
Providence," etc. 

Furthermore, this amphitheatre (which means " to see 
about") and rising-seat form of auditory, which enables 
the hearer to see and hear the preacher equally well in 
all parts of the church, leaves all the pews equally eligi- 
ble and desirable, and prevents that enormous difference 
in their " valuation," which is so common in churches 
where the rich meet together. In some of these oblong, 
level-floored churches one third the seats are simply un- 
endurable, and, so far from wondering why they are never, 
the wonder is that they are ever rented. 

The Play- The audience-room of the house of God 

^ ou ^ e ^£ ht > is constructed in impudent defiance of His 
God's House _ . \ .. . . . 

Wrong. * aws * acoustics, while the playhouse is 

constructed in obedience to those laws. A 

conversational tone may be heard in any part of the 



THE PwIGHT SHAPE FOR AN AUDIENCE-IIOOM. 151 

theatre — must be, indeed, or tlie drama fails ; and the 
failure of ordinary colloquial cadences in a church is a 
failure of a fundamental element in all public speaking 
— the colloquial element. 

'No comedian would endure, in the way of a wearing- 
tearing audience-room, for one evening, what preachers 
will bear with and die of every Sunday, year iii and year 
out ; and the ordaining clergy, together with all the 
solemn divines who launch the theological graduates, and 
the entire bureau of anonymous advisers of the parsons, 
yea, and the w T hole noble army of pulpit martyrs may 
continue to iterate and reiterate their panacea of " Be 
in earnest," and " Be natural," until Gabriel's trump 
shall wake the dead, and not one building committee or 
church will awake even then to a sense of their responsi- 
bility for these stumbling-blocks to the Gospel. 

Let us hope that the day will come when building 
committees, and churches that are put in trust with the 
Gospel, and preachers whose very lives are at stake, will 
not allow themselves to be ensnared by the "Gothic" 
nonsense of a " florid " architect, but will insist, first of 
all, and last of all, that it shall be at least as easy to hear 
and see where the Gospel is preached, as where the 
comedian splits the ears of the groundlings, and the 
minstrels dance in clogs. 

To recapitulate : 

I. The horse-shoe form, with thespeak- 

, . ,i ii Recapitulation, 

er between the calks. 

II. No angles or recesses or projections before, be 
side, or behind the speaker. 

III. The seats so elevated and graduated as to put the 
speaker in full view of every hearer, and every hearer in 
full view of the speaker, without his being obliged to 
change his position. 



152 BEFORE AN AUDIENCE. 

The harder the walls the better for articulate sound ; 
but as stone and brick are often out of the question, 
there is no need of worrying over their absence. But 
the absence of these three conditions, or any one of them, 
is a sin to be repented of and forsaken in the sight of 
God. 

The lower the ceiling the better, and the less waste 
space in it the better. If you have a vast and lofty ceil- 
ing without galleries, the audience will hear better seated 
on the under side of the roof than on the upper side of 
the floor. The echo in an audience-room is the jeer of 
science at the perversity of man. It says, Ha ! ha ! 
where is now their God of acoustics ! 



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